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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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i UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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LECTURES 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF 

PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY 

1885-1886 



BY 



Presidents McCOSH, WALKER, BARTLETT, 

ROBINSON, PORTER, and CARTER, and 

Rev. Drs. HALE and BROOKS 






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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

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1887 



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Copyright, 1887, 
By The Trustees of the Phillips Exeter Academy. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



PREFACE. 



During the year 1885-1886, a course of lectures 
was delivered by a number of eminent scholars to the 
students of Phillips Exeter Academy, at Exeter, in 
New Hampshire. Some of these gentlemen have con- 
sented to the publication of their lectures, and the 
Trustees feel assured that the Alumni of the Acad- 
emy, and others interested in similar institutions, will 
be gratified with the opportunity thus afforded to sat- 
isfy the interest which the list of names and subjects 
appended cannot fail to awaken. 

Boston, May 25, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

PHYSICAL, MENTAL, AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES . 1 
By Rev. Edward Everett Hale, D. D. September 29, 

1885. 

HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE IN THE TRAINING 

AT SCHOOL 25 

By James McCosh, D. D., LL. D., President of Princeton 

College. November 19, 1885. 

SOCIALISM 47 

By Francis A. Walker, LL. D., President of the Massa- 
chusetts Institute of Technology. January 14, 1886. 

THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT IN SCHOLARSHIP . 79 
By Samuel C.^TBartlett, D. D., LL. D., President of Dart- 
mouth College. February 18, 1886. 

THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE 100 

By Franklin Carter, Ph. D., LL. D., President of Wil- 
liams College. May 6, 1886. 

MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE 125 

By E^ G. Robinson, D. D., LL.D., President of Brown 

University. March 18, 1886. 

THE IDEAL SCHOLAR 145 

By Noah Porter, D. D., LL. D., President of Yale Uni- 
versity. April 27, 1886. 

BIOGRAPHY 179 

By Rev. Phillips Brooks, D. D., March 4, 1886. 



PHYSICAL, MENTAL, AND SPIRITUAL 

EXERCISES. 

In opening this course of Lectures, I have thought 
we might spend an hour to advantage in considering 
the relations of bodily training to mental training, 
and in looking for some of the " ties and dependen- 
cies " by which body and mind both are swayed by 
the soul of man, — or might be. At work as you are, 
you are interested, and should be interested, in phys- 
ical exercises, and these will be considered in these 
Lectures. We ought to be curious as to their relation 
to mental training, for which so much of your work 
here is devoted, and we must ask how we are to gain 
more of the life, the strength of will, character, and 
purposes, by which alone can the man make his bodily 
strength or his mental discipline to be of any real 
value. 

Any man who knows American life in this time 
knows the temptation w r hich there is to relegate to 
certain seasons of the year one or other of these lines 
of training, and to wait till another season comes be- 
fore we take up another. One can imagine a man 
like a college instructor I once knew, who said he had 
settled once for all the problems of his religious life, 

and was now ready to carry forward his mental disci- 
l 



2 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

pline ; and we can imagine the same man determining 
to throw his physical exercise into two or three sum- 
mer months in the Adirondacks, or at Bar Harbor. 
You would say that if I described such a division of 
duty, it would be a burlesque. But it does not differ 
from the division which an undergraduate at Cam- 
bridge makes, who devotes all his autumn to training 
for a match in running or in walking, — sure that 
when December comes he can put on double steam 
and "cram" for his semi-annuals; of whom, if you 
should ask what was happening to his soul, — where 
he was looking for strength of will, for force and char- 
acter, — he would say that they must wait for a more 
convenient season. I shall be very glad if I can show 
any one how body, mind, and soul must be trained to- 
gether ; that their training cannot be subdivided by 
any of our whimsical systems. We must learn that 
the training of the man is all important, and that 
when this is rightly ordered the man controls — yes, 
with absolute sway — the mind and the body. They 
are two hounds in the leash, — they must be held sub- 
ordinate to the bidding of the imperial soul. 

All that I am to say of physical exercise, or of 
mental discipline, is said in the hope of securing this 
absolute control. 

And I will not speak simply as if you were always 
to have the order of your time and training regulated 
for you, as it is done here. The time is coming — nay, 
for many of you will come soon — when you must for 
yourselves select and establish the law of your daily 
lives. I shall fail wholly to-night if I do not show 
you that each day must be consecrated, not to one, 
but to three lines of education ; though indeed the 
three ought to be all turned together into one. I want 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 3 

to show you that, in each separate day, there must be 
conscious effort in the development of Body, Mind, 
and Soul. 



First of all, speaking to young men, — and I am 
glad to see that I am speaking to young women also, — 
my advice to them, precisely because they are at what 
has been called the omnipotent age, is not to attempt 
omnipotence. At the best you will be under many 
limitations, and it is well that you should be. Home 
has demands. The laws of school are demands. The 
university will have demands. Society has demands. 
Thus, you must receive visits and make them. You 
must eat and drink ; perhaps you must buy your food, 
or prepare it, or arrange the table. You must wear 
clothes ; perhaps you have to earn the money which 
pays for them ; perhaps it is your place to make 
them. Or there are younger brothers and sisters in 
the family : it is your place to take a fair share in the 
charge of them. Simply speaking, you are in a world 
where you are knit in with other people. Accept that 
position once for all, and do not struggle against it. 

Watching life as it is, and striking a rough average 
of different experiences, I am apt to say to my young 
friends who are making their own plans that, at the 
beginning, they had better satisfy themselves with 
marking out the use which they will make of two or 
three hours a day. As things are, I think that will be 
as much as they can generally manage well. I mean 
to say that most young men owe their employers ten 
hours of the working-day, or they belong to a college 
or an academy for that time. If, beside that, they can 
manage two hours, whether in the evening or in the 



4 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

early morning, for their own uses, I think they had 
better be satisfied ; only crowd these hours full. The 
same is true of young women who are engaged in 
shops, in offices, or in other regular vocations away 
from home. And, to continue to speak with the same 
precision, young women who are at home, without a 
profession, calling, or vocation, will have domestic 
duties such as I alluded to, and social calls, which are 
duties also, so frequent and making such demands on 
vital powers that they had better not form plans, as 
I believe, for more than three hours in a day. The 
young woman who fights for more fights at disad- 
vantage ; she has not her work well in hand, and is 
constantly worried and worn. The apparent difference 
between the two hours' people and the three hours' 
people, as I have divided them, is not, in fact, real. 
There are advantages which belong to the first class, 
as I think we shall see. 

I am, also, in the habit of advising in a very me- 
chanical and wooden way, if you please, when I offer 
suggestions as to the use of these hours : — 

Divide them between body, mind, and soul, and, if 
you are at all afraid of a mistake, divide them evenly. 
Take an hour for bodily exercise ; take an hour for 
the training of your mind ; and also one hour in such 
work for others, such talk with God, or for both, that 
you may be more manly and more womanly, more 
like him, when the day has gone by. The counsel is 
sufficiently wooden to be remembered. In practice, 
of course, it can be deviated from in detail. You see 
that the three uses of time may all be subserved at 
once. All the same, it is true that each day, and the 
part of it for which you are responsible, ought to see 
you advance in the training of body, mind, and soul. 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. * 5 

Now, with regard to the first of these, those of you 
who have had to walk to an office, or a shop, or to rec- 
itations, in the morning, and back at night, have 
managed your physical exercise by the way. You 
have then your two hours free for the intellectual 
training you seek, and for your unselfish duties ; and 
that is all that, under our plan, those persons who 
have no stated vocation which calls them out-of-doors 
are to devote to these cares. 

Mechanical as this subdivision seems, I have found 
it, in a thousand cases, convenient to make it, relying, 
of course, on good sense and good feeling to interpret 
and administer the rule. Nor have I ever known, 
whether in written biography or in the experience of 
others confided to me, a case of disordered life or of 
low spirits, which are the signs of disordered life, 
which could not be improved by a fair administration 
of a rule so simple even if it be wooden. Low spirits 
are the sign that something is wrong. When your 
patient finds that he is in protracted low spirits, make 
him tell whether in his management of a day he does 
not neglect his bodily exercise, or his mental training, 
or that unselfish life, — that life of God and man which 
a man's soul requires. 

In such an attack of depressed spirits, it has become 
now almost a commonplace to say at once that the 
patient probably needs physical exercise, and so to 
send him out to row in a boat, to take a walk, or to 
ride on horseback. Here is a crude recognition of the 
necessity involved. But it is not certain that the de- 
ficiency is the need of physical exercise. There are 
men and women who have exercise enough in the open 
air, who know only too well what are the terrors of 
depressed spirits. The danger is the danger of any 



6 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

want of balance. That man knows it who is caring 
only for his physical exercise ; that man knows it 
who is caring only for his books and intellectual train- 
ing ; and alas, many a man and many a woman have 
known it who have devoted all their powers only to 
religious aspirations. In such cases what I have a 
right to call a moral dyspepsia results as certainly and 
as terribly as ever physical dyspepsia followed under 
one of the other exaggerations. 



II. Bearing in mind, all along, the interdependence 
of exercise for the body with exercise of the mind, 
and determining that both shall be swayed by the im- 
perial soul, let us ask some questions, for future an- 
swer, perhaps as to our physical and our mental edu- 
cation. 

And I will say next to nothing about those athletic 
exercises about which the wise fashion of to-day is en- 
thusiastic, because I have little time, — and I am glad 
to think that young men at Exeter need little sugges- 
tion regarding them. In speaking of bodily train- 
ing, I will begin with the duty of sleep. Sleep, pro- 
found and healthy, is the first of the physical duties, 
— good sleep and enough. Whatever hinders it must 
be thrown overboard. Even the old proverbs must 
give way, if need be, — the requisite in young life 
being that you shall rise for a day's duty hopeful, 
cheerful, and strong, with none of yesterday's arrears 
to carry. Do not forget the gospel direction, that you 
are to be new-born every morning, and to start really 
with the freshness of a little child. If your fit of 
special exertion yesterday, — the " German " pro- 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 7 

tracted till two o'clock in the morning, the puzzle in 
the counting-room to find out where those lost two 
cents had gone from the balance-sheet, — if such 
things as these last night bring you to this morning 
with a hot head, after feverish tossing through the 
small hours, you are simply committing suicide by 
inches. And such suicide is not to be judged by dif- 
ferent canons from those which condemn the sudden 
blow. 

Sleep comes without asking and without thought, 
indeed, when we are loyally obeying the great laws, 
when we are in the service which is perfect freedom. 
" He giveth his beloved sleep " is an oracle of pro- 
found significance. 1 

Now I know I traverse the habits, and I suppose 
the opinions, of many excellent people, when I say 
that exercise in the open air every day of life is also 
a necessity for young people who are well and who 
would keep well. I know what the excuses are, — of 
climate, dress, occupation, and all that. Let them go. 
The truth is that fresh air is health, and the loss of it 
is disease. Nor is that American habit I ridicule, of 
trying to do all your work at once and in the bulk, 
ever more absurd than when we try to take all our 
fresh air on Monday by an excursion down the harbor, 

1 I have attempted some details on this subject elsewhere; 
and I eagerly refer readers who need to Dr. W. A. Hammond's 
admirable essay on Sleep. I will say here that hard mental 
work in the last three or four hours in the working-day should 
be avoided. Far better to study between five and seven in the 
morning than between eight and ten at night. Never work on 
mathematics in these hours (or within an hour after any meal). 
Do not write your absorbing and exciting letters then. On the 
other hand, a walk, or better, perhaps, a run, just before bed- 
time, is an excellent night-cap. 



8 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

and so to buy the right to live shut up in prison Tues- 
day, Wednesday, and Thursday, over our dressmaking 
or housekeeping, our accounts or other business, or 
our study. I am to speak, by and by, of the nearer 
communion with God which a man enjoys who walks 
with him, as Adam did in the garden, in the cool of 
the day. It is not of that that I speak now, but of 
the mere physical conditions which keep the physical 
machine in order. For a person in health, the preser- 
vation of health demands daily exercise in the open 
air, winter or summer, country or city, cold or hot, wet 
or dry. 

And, though I have eschewed detail, let me ask my 
young friends to undertake it. It is worth any boy's 
while, or any girl's, for instance, to see what care 
those old Greeks thought it wise to give to such mat- 
ters. Look, for instance, into such books as Ana- 
charsis's Travels, Landor's Pericles and Aspasia, 
Becker's Charicles, Mahaffy's Athenian Life, or the 
proper articles in Smith's Dictionary, to see how it 
was that the Greek sculptors had at hand such forms 
as the Apollo, the Genius of Life, or the Venus of 
Milo. It was by no accident that Sophocles lived 
strong and well till he was ninety-five, or that the little 
city of Athens, when it was not as big as Lawrence or 
Worcester is to day, had then such a cluster of well- 
trained men, with bodies well-nigh perfect. These 
men were trained in a school which sought for bodily 
health by system and regimen. 

If I were to speak of details, it would not be simply 
of the exercises of the Greek gymnasium. I have been 
asked to say a special word as to the value of sweep- 
ing a room as a physical exercise for women or men, 
and I ought to say that some scientific persons give it 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 9 

the first place. Dancing, also, deserves the place 
which it has won in all history and in all civilizations 
except that of the Puritans ; and there, as you know, 
it has fought its way through, though against tremen- 
dous odds. Of course you would not advise a boy to 
dance all night, more than you would advise a girl to 
sweep all day ; and there ought to be as little danger 
of one excess as the other. If, again, while I pass 
other exercises without a word, I select the exercise of 
swimming, it is because this community is just now 
neglecting it. If I had my way, there should be pub- 
lic and universal instruction in swimming, for girls as 
well as boys. In the event of accident, a woman ought 
to be as well able as a man to save her own life or to 
rescue others. I do not think it is creditable to Bos- 
ton that other cities should be far in advance of us 
in their provisions for teaching swimming. And it is 
to be said of swimming that it is an absolutely perfect 
exercise. 

Thus much of those physical exercises which are 
simply personal; which Robinson Crusoe might and 
must have followed out on his island, though he were 
never to be rescued. There is another series which 
will interest you young people more, because they have 
to do with your relations with others ; although you 
could carry them out on a desert island, in fact you 
train yourself in them because we live in society with 
others. These are the lines of what we call " accom- 
plishments," not speaking very precisely. Here, again, 
I do not attempt much detail, but I do want you to 
consider them as moral beings do. I want to put 
them on the plane of morals. And if you will put 
them there, you may study the details yourselves. 
Your consciences, quick and pure, and sustained by 



10 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

God in answer to your prayer, are your oracles, much 
more quick and reliable for you than any judgments 
of mine. 

With regard to some of these accomplishments, the 
decision is already practically made. For instance, it 
is taken for granted that all of you and all decent 
people shall know how to write. This is a pure phys- 
ical exercise ; as much so as is fencing or swimming. 
It is expected, and rightly expected, that everybody 
shall compass that accomplishment. Now, shall we go 
a step further ? Every one who can write can learn to 
draw. Shall we insist that they all do ? or shall we 
say that only persons with a distinct artistic genius 
shall learn ? or shall we say that only they shall learn, 
and, beside them, certain others also who can be of 
use in teaching drawing ? 

I am quite clear here that we are right in exacting 
the rudiments of this accomplishment from all. I do 
not believe that you will all be artists ; nor is there 
any reason why you should. But there is every reason 
why you should represent correctly, and not incorrectly, 
what you see and what you mean. There is every 
reason why, if you give a carpenter directions for 
repairing your house, you should be able to direct 
him, and not misdirect him. When the general calls 
upon you from the ranks some day, sends you out as 
a scout, and you return with information, you ought 
to be able to plot it properly on paper. When you 
discover a new flower or a new insect in the wilder- 
ness, you ought to be able to represent it correctly in 
the interests of science for those who study. Perhaps 
your sense of color is dull ; perhaps your memory of 
form is bad. None the less ought you to be able to 
see, and to put on paper what you see. And the truth 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 11 

is that learning to draw is learning to see. For the 
rest, let those who love their drawing keep on with it 
and go further. Let the others pass it by and take 
up other exercises. " Those who love it," — that is a 
better statement than " those who have a genius for 
it." If they love it enough to persevere, their genius, 
more or less, will take care of itself. And this defini- 
tion is accurate enough for any young scholar to apply 
it in his own training. 

The next question is infallibly as to the training of 
the voice, still a matter of physical culture. 

Without discussing this in much detail, I will say 
that quite aside from the mere pleasure of singing is 
the exercise of the body involved. All young men 
must learn to speak in public, and both boys and girls 
want to read aloud and to read well. The careful 
training for singing is probably the best exercise for 
the public speaker, and the present striking deficiency 
of the home circle, its difficulty in finding good read- 
ers, will cease when it has those who have opened their 
chests, learned to use all their muscles, and given 
range to the register of voice by exercise in singing. 

One step further. We will try all the children in 
singing, and we will give up those who do not love it 
or those who cannot learn. Shall we try them all with 
instruments of music ? Shall we place fifty thousand 
piano-fortes in the fifty thousand dwelling-houses of 
Boston ? Or, failing them, shall we substitute parlor 
organs, harps and citherns, violins and instruments of 
ten strings ? Such seems to be the present disposition, 
encouraged, as I have sometimes supposed, by the 
manufacturing disposition of the New Englander, and 
our skill in making musical instruments of the first 
quality. 



12 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

But, as you see, the plan travels beyond the disci- 
pline of the man ; it requires that he shall also possess 
an instrument, and a complex instrument. And it is 
probably at this line that we are to stop. If he love 
music, let him learn to play ; if he love it enough, let 
him be Joseph Haydn, or Mendelssohn, or Eubinstein. 
But if he do not love it, let him choose for his voca- 
tion, or for his avocation, something which he is made 
for. There may be instances where, with all his love, 
he will be slow at learning. That is no matter : he 
has eternity before him. There may be cases where, 
with all his love, he will never work out the great 
achievements, so called. No matter for that. The 
peasant who first hummed the air of Auld Lang Syne 
has given as much pleasure in his day as any monarch 
of music with the grandest symphony. Nay, some 
blundering choir to-day, as it stumbles through Lyons 
or Coronation, if it sing with the spirit, comes nearer 
the Throne of Grace than the Sistine company, if it 
be singing only with the understanding. The object 
with which you learn is not success merely, it is not 
fame merely, but it is best measured by your love of 
what you learn. And the question you have to ask is 
this : " Shall I to-morrow render service more accept- 
able than I rendered yesterday?" 

The requisite is health, and health means balance 
of body, mind, and soul. To Jesus Christ himself, in 
the midst of that cheerful, open-air life of his in Gali- 
lee, so glad that it has been called a constant festival, 
poor John the Baptist sent messengers from his under- 
ground prison, just as we look out from our dim man- 
made prisons upon the glories of the world of God. 
John asked him what he was doing ; and had he for- 
gotten all their plans ? The answers of Jesus are quite 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 13 

as much of bodily health as of mental ; quite as much 
of mental health as of the aspirations of the soul, — 
quite as much, but no more, for of these he speaks 
quite as eagerly as of those. But he cannot separate 
the one from the other. He is engaged in care for all 
three. " In that same hour," says Luke, in his pic- 
turesque way, " he cured many of their infirmities and 
plagues, and of evil spirits ; " body and mind alike 
were comforted ; and the message he sent to John was 
of such comfort as this, of such health as this, with 
the other message that the glad tidings of God were 
taught at the same moment, and with the lesson to 
John, "Blessed is he that shall not be offended in 
me." What lesson and suggestion for us, in what we 
are pleased to call our " spiritual experiences " ! How 
far is my hardness of heart, or the melancholy with 
which I look back on my wicked life, — how far is it 
a spiritual experience ? How much of it is due to dis- 
ordered digestion ? Or where do the freaks of a way- 
ward mind, say of a wild imagination or of ill-ordered 
logic, come in ? Or, if I set myself to minister to the 
poor, as he did, how certain it is that I must prepare 
myself, not simply with the Bible which I carry to 
read to the sick, but with the good sense which shall 
answer the cross-questioning of the dissatisfied, and 
also with the gospel of cleanliness and the open air 
with which I am to dispel head-ache and heaft-ache 
together ! The whole lesson of Jesus Christ is thus for 
balance, — for that health which is the balance of 
training with training, and faculty upon faculty. And 
when we ask these young friends of ours to make him 
the leader of their lives, this is what we mean, — that 
in all such directions as we have been tracing he shall 
be master. He knew how to live, knew how to extort 



14 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

the most from life, to make it abundant, to make it 
glad, and to make it useful. And you, when you try 
to give to these physical exercises some sense, some 
moderation, some purpose and meaning, whether it be 
in a running-match or whether it be in practising the 
scale, you are not on the right track unless the unity 
of all life appears to you as he showed it. You are 
not training your voice, or your hand, or your foot, or 
your eye for your own behoof alone : it is that you 
may bear your brother's burden the better. Who does 
this fulfils Christ's whole law. And because he ful- 
fils it, he does more than appears to the eye. While 
he trains the body, he trains mind and soul. The 
obedience which compels these fingers to that distaste- 
ful task, as they pass up and down the keys, is the 
same quality of life with which Gabriel bears God's 
message from one end of heaven to the other. The 
steadiness which holds to its purpose till the last mo- 
ment of the foot-race is the endurance which endures 
to the end, of which endurance safety, or salvation, is 
the reward. 



III. In speaking now very briefly of the mental dis- 
cipline which must come in as a part of every day of 
life, I do not forget for a moment that the cant about 
"culture" has made that dreadful word ridiculous 
throughout all New England, and among all people 
who laugh at New Englanders. If anybody ought to 
know the absurdity of such cant, it is we who have 
lived in the midst of it. I think we are in no danger. 

We are not proposing, by any course of primary- 
school or secondary-school education, to introduce the 
kingdom of God through the spelling-book. In such 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 15 

follies this community tried its experiments forty years 
ago. We are hoping to serve God, and to serve him 
well. We are seeking his kingdom, and would gladly 
make the entrance to it easier for those who seek to 
enter. Seeking this, we would get the best use we 
can of our tools, — tools which he has given us. Nor 
can a better illustration be found for the training we 
give the mind — which is one of those tools — than we 
have had already in the training we should like to give 
to the body, which is the other. 

1. I am to speak first in the way of caution. This 
caution is to be borne in mind, that mere reading is 
not, in itself, mental training. There is, in this direc- 
tion, a popular superstition. But, in truth, the read- 
ing of a low-lived novel is as bad training as intimacy 
with a low-lived man. That every one sees. We may 
go much farther. To read gossiping novels all day long 
is no more mental training than to talk with gossiping 
fools all day long. It is necessary to give this caution 
in advance, because we have but little time in any day, 
in this plan of life which we are following, and we 
must be careful that that time really goes for what we 
pretend. We will not deceive ourselves. We will not 
talk as if reading the newspapers, or reading maga- 
zines, or reading novels, did us any great good, or were 
a part of our training. I hope they will do us no 
harm ; nor need they. But when we speak of giving 
an hour a day to mental improvement, we do not speak 
of this galloping over pages of novels, or columns of 
newspapers, merely for the entertainment of the hour. 

2. If you can arrange among yourselves to work 
together, a great point is gained. Then the God-given 
stimulus comes in, in the stimulus of society. These 
little clubs to read French, to study history, to try 



16 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

experiments in chemistry, to botanize together, or to 
follow whatever study, are the best possible helps or 
methods. I never tire of describing the system which 
they have arrived at at the English Cambridge, after 
near one thousand years of experiment, as the best pos- 
sible way of study. The young men who are studying 
for honors make such appointment with their tutors 
that each one has every day an hour with his tutor 
alone. If need be, they study the lesson together. 
The teacher not only teaches the lesson, but he shows 
the others how to learn the lesson. Then each scholar 
works upon the tasks assigned, for two or three hours. 
And the work of each day ends when all of these 
teachers and pupils, at the most not more than four, 
meet for at least an hour, and all together work with 
mutual help. That is the best system which the ex- 
perience of so many centuries has devised for the best 
training for the best men in it. 

Now, there is no necessity of going to a university 
for what is the most valuable part of this training. 
Its value comes from their all working together. Any 
three or four friends who can meet daily, or not so 
often, to read together, can command it. Life quick- 
ens life. There is one funny person, one imaginative 
person, one with a strong memory, one who is steady- 
going and holds the others to their tasks. The work 
is of better quality, it is better remembered ; and a 
real training of the mind is involved. It is a great 
thing to learn to tell what you know. It is a much 
greater thing to learn to confess ignorance. It is 
greater yet to learn how to live with others, — how to 
repress your own arrogance, how to endure other peo- 
ple's ; or, in general, how to make allowance for the 
finite or fallible elements in other lives, and how to 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 17 

make out and make the best of the infinite elements, 
which are invaluable. All this mental practice is bet- 
ter gained in a literary club, or a circle to read French, 
than in the City Council or in Congress ; and that is 
true, — which is always true, — that he who succeeds 
in these lesser things carries in his success the power 
to rule cities, as the parable puts it. The experience 
of the little gives the victory on the larger scale. 

3. And what are you to study or to read ? On what 
bone are you to gnaw in this discipline ? The choice 
is your own. That is the first thing to say. At school 
you are to do what they tell you to do. Afterwards 
you are to do what you think you need most and can 
do best. These two directions go together. You are 
not always, as a matter of course, to study the thing 
which you know least. Perhaps, with all the study in 
the world, you would not compass it. By the time 
you leave school you ought to know. Study what 
you need most and can do best. There is wide range 
for choice ; but now it is range where your likings 
and your genius both have play. 

Mr. Emerson, who is one of the wisest teachers here, 
says in one place, when he is directing us how to buy 
books, that we are to buy books " in the line of our 
genius." But, for boy or girl of seventeen years of 
age, the trouble generally is that one does not yet know 
what the line of his genius is. Nor is it any blame to 
man or woman, if either of them cannot, till death, de- 
cide a question so delicate. Mr. Emerson said again, 
when consulted as to a course of study : " It does not 
matter so much what you study as with whom you 
study." Something you are interested in, something 
you like, and something you need. When one has 

rightly learned his own ignorance, — and that is what 
2 



18 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

we go to school for, — he ought to be able to choose. 
If you have found out at seventeen that you cannot well 
follow the mathematics, leave them for those who can. 
If, after fair trial, you make nothing of metaphysics, 
let them go to those who can. If it prove that you de- 
light in the high-ways and by-ways of history, — if old 
times begin to grow real to you, and these dead skele- 
tons of names to take flesh and color, — study history. 
If you follow Stanley, or Kane, or these new travellers 
in Australia, step by step, with eager curiosity, study 
geography. If you have won a triumph at the debat- 
ing club, because you have untangled some knot of 
finance or of tariff, and if the researches of the econ- 
omist attract you, study real politics, — the economies 
of wealth. You ought to be able to decide the sub- 
ject better than any one can choose for you. 

4. When you have decided, hold to your decision. 
I had a young friend who used to come to me once a 
week, one winter, to borrow books and consult about 
his reading. At first, I was delighted with the breadth 
of his views and the courage of his study. But when 
I found that in twenty weeks he had attacked as 
many of the fundamental subjects, and abandoned 
them, I became uneasy. His enthusiasm turned in two 
months from organic chemistry to Roman jurispru- 
dence, from that to organized philanthropy in modern 
life, from that to Darwinism and the law of selection, 
from that to the English Constitution, from that to 
Augustinianism and the theology of the fall of man, 
and so on. What made this alarming was that on 
each subject he was sure, on successive Saturdays, that 
it was the only subject for a man of conscience to en- 
gage in in our times, and he generally borrowed as 
many books as he could carry for its study. 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 19 

" Unstable as water, thou slialt not excel." That is 
the old Hebrew warning againt such foolery. Choose 
your line of study, and hold on ; let book lead to book, 
subject open from subject. Never fear but the range 
will be wide enough before you have done. I sin- 
cerely believe that, with the resources of our great 
public libraries, any man or woman of spirit who chose 
to take up a subject of detail, which had not been 
already wrought out by a specialist, might, in a month's 
time, be in advance of any person in the community 
on that line of research. I could safely, I believe, 
make the statement for a shorter period. You do have 
the encouragement of feeling that what you work upon 
may soon be of use to others also. It is not mere 
" culture." It is work of real service to God and to 
man. But this implies continued service ; that you 
shall not fling away week after week of life, like the 
weather-cock fool I have been describing. Advance 
from step to step. Make your base here for a move- 
ment there ; establish another base for a farther move- 
ment ; and never be satisfied to regard the work you 
are doing as anything less than a part of your contri- 
bution eventually to the improvement of the world. 

5. If you so regard it, this regular exercise will not 
be set aside on whatever excuse or fancy. You and 
your companions will hold to it day by day as indeed 
a duty, not a bit of relaxation or entertainment merely. 
You will come to regard it as something which must 
be, not to be set aside for light cause, — more than 
your dinner, your breakfast, or your sleep. No harm 
if in time you make other people regard it as a neces- 
sity. In all new countries everything is exceptional 
and nothing regular. I cannot have my meals as 
punctually when I have to shoot the rabbit or the deer, 



20 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

and skin him and cook him for myself, as I can have 
them when they are served at a hotel. But the word 
"civilization" means escape from such disorder and 
irregularity. High civilization means that the ball 
falls and the bell strikes precisely at twelve ; that the 
train for New York leaves precisely at ten or at eight ; 
that the schools open precisely at nine. It means as 
well that when you have seriously agreed with a circle 
of your friends to meet regularly at a certain time for 
the reading of history, you will do so. That is one of 
the things where you will be master. You are not 
claiming, as we have seen, to be master for four and 
twenty hours. For a great part of the four and twenty 
hours you have even agreed to be obedient to the 
wishes of others. But for these two or three hours 
you are to be master. Neither your indolence, nor 
your modesty, nor your good nature, is to surrender 
this claim. Nor are you claiming this for yourself. 
As God's child, you are trying to serve him, and the 
claim you make is on his behalf : it is not yours. 
Having determined, perhaps with others, to follow this 
course of training, whatever it may be, let that deter- 
mination be final and absolute. 

6. And now I come to a direction vastly more im- 
portant than any or all of these matters of detail. The 
mind is beneath your own control, if you will choose 
to assert that control early. It shall not think of mean 
things or bad things, unless you permit it. Not at 
once, indeed, but yet by slow training, that control is 
possible. Yes, and the first direction is this, of the 
sensible though enthusiastic Paul, that a man shall 
not think of himself ; and he adds, with a certain 
humor which never long leaves him, indeed, " more 
highly than he ought to think," — a condition which, to 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 21 

most of us, leaves the range of thinking which is per- 
mitted on a plane sufficiently if not ludicrously low. 

In another statement of St. Paul's, which we cannot 
consider too often, he says of the Saviour himself : 
" He made himself of no reputation." The two phrases 
together are the sternest rebuke of this self-conscious 
thought of one's self which uses man's noblest power 
for what is man's meanest business. Warning enough, 
or rebuke enough, if warning and rebuke would save 
us ! And when these do not save a man, — when he 
yields to the temptation and uses his reason only about 
himself, uses his memory to remember his own affairs 
only, uses his imagination only to build his own air- 
castles, his skill in the mathematics only to compute 
his own fortune, — then the punishment in store for him 
is the punishment most terrible. For the time is be- 
fore him when he shall not be able to turn his thought 
away from the central figure. He shall go to the the- 
atre to see the marvels of the drama ; but the scene 
shall pass before his eyes, he noticing nothing, because 
he sees nothing but himself ; he sits acting over some 
mortifying failure. Or, he shall buy the last romance 
and take it home and read ; but there is no story for 
him, — no lover and no mistress, no plot and no de- 
nouement. He cannot separate himself from these 
steadily recurring memories, to which he has taught 
the fibres of his brain to recur. Or, he shall travel ; 
but, alas ! he takes his familiar with him, and with 
mockery, like that of Mephistopheles, in every Alpine 
valley, in every picture-gallery, and at every pageant, 
here the old chatter begins again about " me " and 
"mine" and "I" and "myself," which it would be 
such mercy to leave at home. Poor wretch, he cannot 
leave it at home ! He thought when he was a boy 



22 PHYSICAL, MENTAL, 

that these simple words, " He made himself of no rep- 
utation," had no meaning for him. He would make 
himself a name to be trumpeted. He thought, when 
he read in St. Paul that no man was to think of him- 
self, that this was an Oriental exaggeration, or it was 
for eighteen centuries ago ; or, briefly, that he knew 
better than St. Paul. He thought so ; but he learned 
that the punishment for that conceitedness* is to be 
cursed with one's own company, one's own thoughts, 
one's own memories. 

Of which disease the remedy also is offered by the 
same physician : " Let a man think soberly," he says ; 
and in another place, " Whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are hon- 
est, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report, if there be any virtue or if there be 
any praise, think on these things." Now this instruc- 
tion is practical ; not meant for rhetoric or poetry, but 
as a direction for an intelligent man to pursue in the 
conduct of life. You can keep impure thoughts out 
of your mind by thinking of that which is pure. You 
can keep yourself out of your mind by thinking of 
other people. And, to train the mind in generous and 
large thought, so that it may not fall back to mean 
thought and small, is the most important duty you 
have in this part of life, which has to do with making 
ready your weapons. 



And these illustrations must be all that I must at- 
tempt. They will be enough to show how you ought 
to consider every question of detail. The accomplish- 
ments of the Greek sophists were wasted, as the de- 
portment of every Turveydrop is absurd, because neither 



AND SPIRITUAL EXERCISES. 23 

of them made the man more manly or the woman more 
womanly. And all education is worthless unless it 
secures this end. It must secure strength of will. It 
must double force. It must build up character. Have 
you heard it said, perhaps, that in the later school of 
English novels the element of religious culture has 
dropped out, — that in most of these novels the hero 
or the heroine almost never speaks of God, or heaven, 
or Saviour, or Bible ? This may or may not be true 
as a superficial criticism of the outside of these books. 
But what is far more important in the best of them is 
that they insist so steadily as they do upon character, 
— upon the living force of the living man. Your hero 
stands consistent and persistent, and will not give way. 
You may make a beggar of him, and he will not quail. 
You may outvote him, but he defies you. He is 
stronger than parties, he is stronger than fashion, he 
is stronger than numbers, he is stronger than money. 
This means simply that he is a true man, and that 
man is omnipotent, when he chooses the right ally. 
It means that nothing prevails against character. 

Now the creation of such character is the object or 
the result of all true education, of all bodily training, 
of all mental discipline, and of all spiritual exercises. 
To say all in one word, oifer yourselves wholly, body, 
soul, and spirit, to your God. Does this seem an ec- 
clesiastical phrase ? It means simply this : — 

Do not separate your religion from the rest of life, 
but soak your life in your religion, and your religion in 
your life, for you ought not to be able to separate the 
two. You are not God's child on Sunday, and a child 
of the world on Monday. You are God's child all the 
time. It is not God's law that you obey when you eat 
the bread of communion, and the world's law when 



24 PHYSICAL EXERCISES, ETC. 

you compute interest in the counting-room ; it is all 
God's law, and you can make the one duty as sacred 
as the other. You can row your boat, when you are 
pulling in a match, loyally, bravely, truly, as a pure, 
unselfish boy rows it, and so as to please God who 
gives you strength for that endeavor. You can sit at 
the piano, and practise your scales, humbly, patiently, 
and with the same determination with which an arch- 
angel goes about his duties. You can do that to God's 
glory. And God is pleased when you make that en- 
deavor. You can take your baby-brother to ride ; you 
can lift his carriage upon the curb-stone gently when 
there is a street to cross ; you can meet the perplex- 
ities and irritations of that care as Uriel stood be- 
fore the sun, to keep watch and ward. The charge 
may be as true, as pure, and as grand. It may be a 
part of your sacrifice and of your religion. 

For you and me the effort is to be, not simply to 
stand at the altar, or to watch the wreaths of incense* 
or simply to repeat the words of the service, though 
this in its place may please us and help us ; but to 
make the world a temple as we make life a joy, by 
living, moving, and being in God, with God, and for 
God. That common care may be glorified, that daily 
duty may be made divine, to you, — this is the begin- 
ning, middle, and end. 



HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE IN THE 
TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 




-5 — _ ^V\^> 



We are all familiar with habit. We feel it work- 
ing within ourselves, and we see it operating in others. 
It has been shown that it derives its power mainly 
from the laws of the association of ideas. Certain 
mental states, certain thoughts and feelings, have fol- 
lowed each in a certain order once, twice, ten times, 
or a hundred times, and now on any one of these com- 
ing up the others will be disposed to follow : quite as 
naturally as the stone falls to the ground, or as water 
bursting from its fountain will flow in the channel 
formed for it. When the habits are bodily ones they 
are confirmed by the law, that when any organ of our 
frame is exercised there is a greater flow of blood and 
vital energy towards it, and it is made stronger and 
more active. These two laws of our compound nature 

— the one mental and the other corporeal — gener- 
ate habit, which is characterized by two marked fea- 
tures : — 

(1.) There is a tendency to repeat the acts which 
have often been done. You wonder at the drunkard 
become so infatuated ; but the grieving, the downcast 
mother, or the disheartened wife, can tell you of a time 

— and a sigh heaves her bosom as she speaks of it — 



26 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

when the now outcast and degraded one was loved 
and respected, and returned with regularity to quiet 
and domestic peace in the bosom of the family. But, 
alas ! he would not believe the warnings of a parent ; 
he did not attend to the meek unobtrusive recommen- 
dations of a wife or sister ; he despised the commands 
of the living God ; and, seeking for happiness where 
it has never been found, he spurned at those who told 
him that the habit was fixing its roots, till now he 
has become the scorn and jest of the thoughtless, and 
the object of pity to the wise and good ; talking of 
his kindness of heart while his friends and family 
are pining in poverty ; boasting to his companions, 
in the midst of his brutal mirth, of his strength of 
mind, and yet unable to resist the least temptation. 
What we see in so marked a manner in drunkenness 
has equal place, though it may not be so striking, in 
the formation of every other habit ; as of indolence, 
which shrinks from every exertion ; and of avarice 
and worldly - mindedness, which keep us ever toiling 
among the clay of this earth ; and licentiousness, which 
wades through filth till it sinks hopelessly into the mire 
of pollution. The young man is driven on as by a 
terrible wind behind moving to fill up a vacuum, as by 
a tide with its wave upon wave pursuing each other, 
under an attracting power which will not let go its 
grasp. In all cases we see how difficult it is for those 
who have been accustomed to do evil to learn to do 
well ; at times almost as impossible as for a man who 
has thrown himself from a pinnacle to rise up when 
he is half-way down, or for a man who has committed 
himself to the stream above Niagara to stop when he 
is at the very brink. 

And let no man try to excuse his criminality on the 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 27 

ground that the acts are now beyond his will. He 
should resist the wave till it has expended itself ; he 
should seek a more favorable wind to drive him along. 
He is even now to blame for not resisting the evil and 
not seeking divine aid to help him out of the pit ; and 
he is chiefly and above all to blame for the habit 
which is his formation throughout. For it was by re- 
peated acts that the man wore the ruts and deepened 
the ruts out of which it is now so difficult to move 
him. It was the glass of rum or brandy from day 
to day, the intoxicating drinks from week to week, at 
the dinner or evening party : it was this that formed 
the addictedness to intemperance. In these processes 
there was criminality at every step ; and all that en- 
sues — this slavery and these chains — is a judicial in- 
fliction for the evil that has been done : the punish- 
ment here, as in hell, adding to the greatness and viru- 
lence of the wickedness. In most cases, indeed, the 
man did not see the consequences, but it is because he 
shut his eyes to them. He would do the deed only 
this one time, and then he would stop. But the temp- 
tation which swayed him the first time anew presents 
itself and is once more yielded to. Having crossed the 
line which separates vice from virtue, he thinks that 
a few more transgressions may not much aggravate the 
offence ; he therefore goes a little farther, still cher- 
ishing the idea that he may return at any time. At 
length some rash deed of excess, or unexpected ex- 
posure, shows him that it is time to draw back ; and 
then it is that he feels how difficult the retreat. It 
was easy to slide into the net ; but what obstacles catch 
him as he would draw back ! His past motion has 
created a momentum which impels him farther and 
ever on towards the gulf. " Be not deceived, God is 



28 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

not mocked ; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall 
he also reap." He has sown to the flesh, and of the 
flesh he now reaps corruption. He has sown to the 
wind, and the whirlwind rises to toss him along as by 
an irresistible power. He has set the stone a-rolling, 
and he has to answer for the injury it may do as it 
descends. He has loosed the wagon and let it go down 
the inclined plane, and he is responsible for all the 
havoc it may work as it dashes on with ever acceler- 
ated speed. There are affecting cases in which the 
man is conscious of his misery as he sinks, like those 
travellers who are lost in the Alps down the snowy 
descent into the awful gulf. Take the following con- 
fession of a man of genius, a poet, and a philosopher, 
at the time when he had become the slave of opium, 
taken in the first instance to relieve a bodily disease : 
" Conceive," says Coleridge, " a poor miserable wretch, 
who for many years had been attempting to beat off 
pain by a constant recurrence to the vice which repro- 
duces it. Conceive a spirit in hell tracing out for 
others the road to that heaven from which his vices 
exclude him. In short, conceive whatever is most 
wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as 
tolerable a notion of my state as it is possible for a 
good man to have. I used to think the text in James, 
that he who offended in one point offends in all, very 
harsh; but now I feel the tremendous, the awful truth 
of it. For the one sin of opium what crimes have I 
not made myself guilty of ! Ingratitude to my Maker 
and to my benefactors, and unnatural cruelty to my 
poor children ; nay, too often, actual falsehood. After 
my death I earnestly entreat, that a full and unquali- 
fied narration of my wretchedness and its guilty cause 
may be made public, that, at least, some little good 
may be effected by the direful example." 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 29 

(2.) Habit gives a facility in doing acts which have 
often been performed. This peculiarity is derived from 
that just considered. It is the tendency that gives 
the facility; the acquired momentum that gives the 
velocity. At first the work could be done only by an 
effort, only by a special act of the will setting itself 
to devise means and avoid obstacles. Now the process, 
once begun, goes on of itself. As a consequence, that 
which may at first have been irksome, because labo- 
rious, now becomes pleasant because easy, — and now 
natural, that is according to a natural law. 

Under the other aspect of habit, we were led to 
view its evil results. Now we are rather invited to 
contemplate its beneficent effects ; and, surely, the law 
of habit, like every other part of our constitution, was 
appointed for good by our Maker. True, it is found 
that when we abuse this law it has within itself, and 
evidently provided for this end, the means of inflicting 
a terrible judicial punishment. But, certainly, the law 
is good to them that use it lawfully. We have for- 
gotten a great deal of our childish experiences, yet we 
remember so much, and we see enough to convince us, 
that that little boy has his trials at every stage as he 
learns to read, — as first he masters the letters one 
by one, then the words, word after word ; and then is 
able, out of these black strokes, to gather a history, 
or a science, or a doctrine regarding God and Christ, 
and the soul, and the world to come. And yet how 
easy do we now find all this as in a few minutes we 
read a whole page, with perhaps its 1,500 letters ! I 
mention this for the encouragement of those who are 
pursuing their education. For, gentlemen, our efforts 
to improve our minds should not cease with our child- 
hood. We should be scholars all our days on earth, and 



30 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

until we shall reach the Kingdom of Heaven, where, 
I suppose, we shall also be scholars sitting at the feet 
of the Great Teacher. I recommend that every young 
man should, at every particular time, be ambitiously 
and resolutely engaged at his leisure-hours in master- 
ing some new branch of knowledge, secular or sacred. 
Let one propose to himself to acquire a new language, 
say German or French ; another, to master a science, 
say chemistry or natural history ; a third, to become 
thoroughly familiar with some department of civil his- 
tory ; while others, or the same, would make them- 
selves conversant with Bible history, or of the history 
of the Church of Christ in the early ages, or of the 
Reformation struggle, with its instructive lessons and 
thrilling incidents of suffering and martyrdom ; or 
they would master the system of Christian theology, 
or the plan and reasoning of the Epistle to the Ro- 
mans. In prosecuting any one of these studies, they 
will find difficulties ; but let me assure them for their 
encouragement, that these will be felt only at the be- 
ginning, and will disappear and be forgotten, like the 
difficulties you had years ago in learning the alpha- 
bet. And these difficulties being overcome, you will 
find your minds strengthened and braced by the very 
effort you have made and the victory you have gained. 
Of all attainments, my young friends, youthful habits 
of a useful kind are to you the most valuable, — more 
valuable than even all the knowledge you may have 
acquired in forming them. And youth is the special 
time for acquiring habits : habits of industry and 
application ; habits of manliness and independence ; 
habits of activity ; habits of benevolence and self- 
sacrifice ; habits of reading ; habits of rigid thought ; 
habits of devotion. I have been uttering a warning 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 31 

against the formation of evil habits ; but you will not 
be able to prevent bad habits in any other way than 
by cultivating good ones. You will not be able to 
keep down the weeds except by preoccupying the soil 
with good seed. And, as I have said, the very la- 
bor you have undergone in forming good habits will 
harden you for further exertion. There is a fable 
told somewhere of a Norman captain, who became 
possessed of the virtues — whether courage, sagacity, 
perseverance, or whatever else — of the persons slain 
by him in battle. This fable becomes a fact in the 
history of every one who has acquired a good habit. 
Every difficulty surmounted by him in a branch of 
useful knowledge clothes him with new strength and 
prepares him for new conquests. 

I am to apply these general laws of habit to the 
subject of education. 

It should be a principal aim of education to produce 
good habits. The teacher should not be satisfied with 
mere mechanical rules prescribed in the text-book or 
laid down by himself. The pupil should not be con- 
tented with learning lessons by rote. Habit is pro- 
verbially a second nature, and the instruction should 
be engrafted into this second nature. The work should 
not be regarded as over when the pupil has finished 
his lesson ; it should be called up anew and subjected 
to a process of rumination. The boy learning Latin 
should be taught to think at times in Latin, and in 
Greek when he is learning Greek ; he should, as it 
were, say to himself, How would a Roman put this, or 
an inhabitant of ancient Athens ? and he should apply 
geometry to the figures and heights around him. 

About the first thing which a teacher should seek 



82 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

to produce is a habit of application. In order to do 
this he must secure attention to the lesson learned and 
accuracy in saying it. Most boys have not this power 
naturally ; they are rather characterized by volatility. 
Some seem to have as little power over their own 
minds as they have over those of others. Some never 
acquire the habit, and have to suffer all their life in 
consequence ; and are outstripped by people of in- 
ferior talents, but who are distinguished by their in- 
dustry. Perseverance is a greater security for success 
in life than bright talents, and it is very much the 
result of habits acquired, and ever impelling men to 
go on in the course on which they have entered. The 
bodily frames of the young men now before me are 
growing, and, altogether unconsciously to themselves, 
are taking the shape which they are to retain through 
life : so their characters, at home and at school, are 
being fashioned into the form, good or evil, which 
they are to keep through time and eternity. 

At this point the question arises, What branches 
should be taught in our upper schools to secure this 
end ? I have to reply first in a general way, that it 
should be the highest aim of a school and college to 
educate, that is, to draw out and educate the faculties 
which God has given us. Our Creator, no doubt, 
means all things in our world to be perfect in the 
end ; but He has not made them perfect ; He has left 
room for growth and progress ; and it is a task laid 
on His intelligent creatures to be fellow-workers with 
Him in finishing that work which He has left incom- 
plete, merely that they may have honorable employ- 
ment in completing it. Education ought to be a gym- 
nastic to all our powers, not overlooking those of the 
body ; that every muscle may be braced to its manly 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 33 

exercise, that our young men may be able to assume 
the natural posture and make proper use of their arms 
and limbs, which so many of our best scholars feel in 
their public appearances to be inconvenient appen- 
dages. It should seek specially to stimulate and 
strengthen, by exercising, the intellectual powers : such 
as the generalizing or classifying by which we arrange 
the objects which present themselves into group, ordi- 
nate and coordinate ; and the abstracting, analyzing 
capacities, by which we reduce the complexities of 
nature to a few comprehensible and manageable ele- 
ments ; and the reasoning, by which we rise from the 
known and the present to the unknown and remote. 
The studies of an educational institution should be 
organized towards this end, and all its apparatus of 
languages, sciences, physical and mental, and mathe- 
matical exercises should be means to accomplish it. 

But then man has other endowments than the un- 
derstanding in the narrow sense of the term : he has 
a fancy capable of presenting brighter pictures than 
any reality, an imagination which will not be confined 
within the limits of time and this world, a taste and a 
sensibility which can appreciate beauty and sublimity 
in earth and sky ; and these ought to be called forth 
and cultivated in our academic groves by youth being 
made to know and led to relish our finest literature, 
ancient and modern, in prose and poetry; I add — 
though, in doing so, I may seem to be placing the 
ideal too high — by having museums and art-galleries, 
the means of displaying the aesthetic qualities of the 
creature, inanimate and animate, in art and nature. 
Our academic institutions, which are to fashion the 
ruling minds of the country, are never to forget that 
man has high emotional susceptibilities, which should 



34 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

be evoked by narratives, by eloquence, by incidents 
presented in history, in literature, in art ; and that, as 
the crown upon his brow placed there by his Maker, 
he has a moral and spiritual nature, which is to be 
developed and purified by the contemplation of a holy 
law, and of a holy God embodying that law, and of a 
God incarnate with human sympathies inducing us to 
draw nigh when we should be driven back by a con- 
sciousness of guilt on the one hand, and a view of the 
dazzling purity of the Fountain of Light on the other. 
Now, at this entrance examination every study 
seeking admission into the curriculum of a school or 
college should be made to appear. In order to matric- 
ulation it must show that it is fitted to refine and en- 
large the noble powers which God has given us. In 
accomplishing this end I am prepared to vindicate the 
high place which has been allotted to languages in 
all the famous colleges of the old world and the new, 
though I cannot defend the exclusive place which has 
been given them in some. Without entering upon the 
psychological question whether the power of thinking 
by means of symbols be or be not an original faculty 
of the mind, or the physiological one whether its seat, 
as M. Broca maintains he has proven, be in the pos- 
terior part of the third frontal convolution of the left 
anterior lobe of the brain, I am prepared to maintain 
that it is a natural gift, early appearing and strong in 
youth. You see it in the young child acquiring its 
language spontaneously, and delighting to ring its 
vocables the live-long day ; in the boy of nine or ten 
years old learning Latin — when he could not master 
a science — quite as quickly as the man of mature 
age. In the systematic training of the mind we should 
not set ourselves against, but rather fall in with, this 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 35 

natural tendency and facility. Boys can acquire a 
language when they are not able to wrestle with any 
other severe study ; and why should they not be em- 
ployed in what they are capable of doing ? 

There are persons forever telling us that children 
should be taught to attend to " things " rather than 
" words." But words are things having an important 
place in our bodily organization and mental constitu- 
tion, in both of which the power of speech is one of 
the qualities that raise us above the brutes. And, then, 
it can be shown that it is mainly by language that we 
come to a knowledge of things. This arises not only 
from the circumstance that we get by far the greater 
part of our knowledge from our fellow-men through 
speech and writing, but because it is, in a great meas- 
ure, by words that we are induced, nay, compelled to 
observe, to compare, to abstract, to analyze, to classify, 
to reason. How little can we know of things without 
language ? How little do deaf mutes know till they 
are taught the use of signs ! I have known some of 
them considerably advanced in life who not only did 
not know that the soul was immortal, but even that 
the body was mortal. Children obtain by far the 
larger part of their information from parents, brothers, 
sisters, nurses, teachers, companions, and fellow-men 
generally, and this comes by speech and writing. But 
this is, after all, the least part of the benefit thus de- 
rived ; it is in understanding and using intelligently 
words and sentences that children are first led to no- 
tice particularly things and their properties, to per- 
ceive their resemblances and discern their differences. 
Nature presents us only with particulars, which, as 
Plato remarked long ago, are infinite and therefore 
confusing; and the language formed by our fore- 



36 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

fathers and inherited by us puts them into intelligi- 
ble groups for us. Nature shows us only concretes, 
that is, objects with their varied qualities, that is, with 
complexities beyond the penetration of children ; and 
language makes them intelligible by separating the 
parts and calling attention to common qualities. 
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and other parts 
of speech in a cultivated tongue introduce us to things 
as men have thought about them in the use of their 
faculties and combined them for general and for 
special purposes, primarily, no doubt, for their own 
use and advantage, but turning out to be a valuable 
inheritance to their children, who get access to things 
with the thought of ages superinduced upon them, as 
it were, set in a frame-work for us that we may study 
them more readily. In the phrases of a civilized 
tongue we have a set of discriminations and compari- 
sons spontaneously fashioned by our ancestors, often 
more fresh and subtle, always more immediately and 
practically useful, than those of the most advanced 
science. Then, a new language introduces us to new 
generalizations and new abstractions made, it may be, 
by a people of a different genius and differently situ- 
ated, and thus widens and varies our view of things, 
and saves us from being the slaves of our own tongue, 
saves us, in fact, from putting words for things, put- 
ting counters for money (as Hobbes says), which we 
should be apt to do if we knew only one word for the 
thing. Charles V. uttered a deep truth, whether he 
understood it or not, when he said that a man was as 
many times a man as he acquired a new tongue. Then, 
on learning a language grammatically, whether our 
own or another, we have to learn or gather rules and 
judiciously apply them, to see the rule in the example 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 37 

and collect the rule out of the example ; and in all 
this the more elementary intellectual powers, not only 
the memory, but the apprehension and quickness of 
perception and discernment, are quite as effectually 
called forth and disciplined as by any other study in 
which the youthful mind is capacitated to engage. 

I have been struggling to give expression in a few 
sentences to thoughts which it would require a whole 
lecture fully to unfold. Such considerations seem to me 
to prove that we should continue to give to language 
an important — I do not say an exclusive — place 
in our academies and the younger collegiate classes. 
Among languages a choice must be made, and there 
are three which have such claims that every student 
should be instructed in them; and there are others 
which have claims on those who have special aptitudes 
and destinations in life. There is the Latin, impor- 
tant in itself and from the part which it has played in 
history. It has an educational value from the breadth, 
regularity, and logical accuracy of its structure, giv- 
ing us a perfect grammar, with its clear expression 
and its stately methodical march, like that of a Eoman 
army. It is of vast value from its literature, second 
only to that of Greece in the old and to that of Eng- 
land and Germany in modern times, and a model still 
to be looked to by England and by Germany if they 
would make progress in the future as they have done 
in the past. Besides its intrinsic worth, it has histor- 
ical value as the mother of other European languages, 
as the Italian, the French, the Spanish, the Portu- 
guese, to all of which it is the best introduction ; and 
as the venerated grandmother of our own tongue, 
telling us of its descent, its lineage, and its history : 
as the transmitter — let us not forget — of ancient and 



38 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

Eastern learning to modern times and Western coun- 
tries ; and as the common language for ages on litera- 
ture and philosophy, in law and theology, and thus 
containing treasures to which every educated man re- 
quires some time or other to have access. 

Then there is the Greek, the most subtle, delicate, 
and expressive of all old languages, embodying the 
fresh thoughts of the most intellectual people of the 
ancient world, and containing a literature which is un- 
surpassed, perhaps not equalled, for the liveliness, 
purity, and grace, of its poetry, and for the combined 
firmness and flexibility of its prose, as seen, for in- 
stance, in Plato, who can mount to the highest sub- 
limities and descend to the lowest familiarities without 
falling — like the elephant's trunk, equally fitted to 
tear an oak or lift a leaf. And it is never to be for- 
gotten that it is the language of the New Testament 
in which our religion is embodied. Luther said : "If 
we do not keep up the tongues we will not keep up 
the gospel ; " and so the stream is still to be encour- 
aged to flow on if we would keep up the connection 
between Christianity and its fountains. 

A nation studiously giving up the study of these 
tongues would be virtually cut off from the past, and 
would be apt to become stagnant, like a pool into 
which no streams flow and from which none issue, 
instead of a lake receiving pure waters from above 
and giving them out below. These languages differ 
widely from ours ; but just because they do so they 
serve a good purpose, letting us into a different order 
and style of thought, less analytic, more synthetic, as 
it is commonly expressed, more concrete, as I express 
it, — that is, introducing us to things as they are, and 
in their natural connection. True, they are dead 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 39 

languages ; but then just because they are so we can 
get a completed biography of them ; and as we dis- 
sect them they lie passive, like bodies under the knife 
of the anatomist. As Hobbes puts it, " They have put 
off flesh and blood to put on immortality." They are 
dead, and yet they live ; living in the works which 
have been written in them, with their diversity of 
knowledge ; living specially in their literature, which 
is imperishable ; while for fitness of phrase, brevity, 
clearness, directness, and severity they are models for 
all ages, bringing us back to simplicity when we would 
err by extravagance, and to be specially studied by the 
rising generation of our time, when there is so much 
looseness and inflation, stump oratory and sensation- 
alism. It would be difficult to define, but we all 
know, or at least feel, what is meant by a classical 
taste ; there are persons who acquire its chaste color 
spontaneously, as the Greeks and Romans must have 
done ; but in fact it has been mainly fostered by living 
and breathing in the atmosphere of ancient Greece 
and Rome ; and our youths may acquire it most read- 
ily by travelling in the same region where the air is 
ever pure and fresh. I believe that our language and 
literature will run a great risk of hopelessly degen- 
erating if we are not ever restrained and corrected, 
while we are enlivened and refreshed, by these fault- 
less models. 

There are other tongues which have a claim on edu- 
cated men, such as the French, with its delicate con- 
versational idiom and the abstract clearness, amount- 
ing to transparency, of its prose ; and the German, 
with its profound common sense and its grand litera- 
ture, worthy of being placed alongside that of ancient 
Greece and Rome, and excelling it in the revelation 



40 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

which it gives of the depths of human nature. I am 
inclined to think that either or both of these should 
have places in the courses of our academies and col- 
leges, provided always that they be taught as Greek 
and Latin are, as branches of learning, taught philo- 
logically, taught so as to illustrate character and his- 
tory, and, above all, so as to lead us to appreciate 
their literature. 

But prior to all these and posterior to them, above 
them all and below them all, is a tongue with an im- 
perative claim upon us, and that is our own language, 
the tongue of the mother of us all — Great Britain 
and her colonies — and the language of her eldest 
daughter, which should acknowledge her inferiority 
only in this that she is the daughter and the other the 
mother. It has a claim on our love and esteem be- 
cause it is our own tongue, which we learned at our 
mother's knees, that with which we are and ever must 
be most familiar, and which comes home most closely 
to our hearts ; because it is in itself a noble language, 
with roots simple and concrete, striking deep into 
home and heart experience, and grafted on these from 
foreign stocks for reflective and scientific use ; be- 
cause it has been enriched by the ideas and fancies, 
the comparisons and metaphors, of men profound in 
thought and fertile in imagination ; and yet more be- 
cause of its manly and massive, its rich and varied 
literature, prose and poetry, revolving round themes 
which it never entered into the heart of Greek or Ro- 
man to conceive. If a Briton or an American can 
study only one language, let it be the English. A col- 
lege youth's education is incomplete, though he should 
know all other tongues, if he be ignorant of the ge- 
nius and literature of his own. There should, I hold, 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 41 

be special classes for the English language and litera- 
ture, with competent professors in every academy and 
college of every English-speaking country. But in 
order that English have a place in an educational in- 
stitution, it must fall in with the spirit of the place and 
conform to its laws ; it must be taught as a branch of 
learning, as a branch of science (wissenschaftlicK) ; it 
must be bared up to its roots ; it must be studied in its 
formation, growth, and historical development, and, 
above all, it must be taught so as to give a relish for 
its noblest works in all departments, and thus secure in 
the training of our young men that it has a literature 
in the future not unworthy of its literature in the 
past. 

But are we, you ask, to leave out science from the 
curriculum ? So far from it, I place science higher 
thau language and equal to literature. But let every 
study come at its proper time, at the time when the 
mind is able to take up and understand it. The boy 
or the girl might begin to learn a foreign tongue, say 
Latin or French, about the age of nine or ten, the les- 
sons always being short, simple, and easy, and not 
straining the intellect. Geography and arithmetic, 
which are, in fact, elementary sciences, might begin 
earlier, at eight, or even seven, and might be taught so 
as to become interesting. Mathematics, with the great 
majority of boys, should not be entered upon till the 
understanding is more matured, and the brain, as the 
organ of the mind, consolidated. About the same 
time simple natural science might be commenced, with 
enjoyment attached to it. By this time the observing 
powers are ready, often eager, to work. It is better 
they should be employed in operations that may be 
profitable as well as pleasant, say in gathering plants 



42 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

or minerals, or in observing the form and figures of 
animals. Simple physical or chemical experiments 
may be performed to train to manipulation and to 
mental analysis, that is, to find out what things are 
composed of. These operations might be made partly 
an amusement, but really a means of exercising the 
observing and calling forth the reflecting powers. 
Pains must be taken never to make the teaching a 
mere mass of details — exercising only the memory 
and thereby overloading it and surfeiting it, and pro- 
ducing a disgust which tempts the boy ever after to 
turn away from the study. The youth should be car- 
ried on in science only so far as he understands it. 
Abstract science, dealing with laws and formulas and 
high generalizations, should be reserved for the later 
years of school-life, and be so taught as to allure boys 
on to college, to carry on what they have begun. 

It is to be freely and fully admitted that it is not 
possible to make every member of an academy or col- 
lege a great classical scholar or a great mathematician, 
nor to make every student keep up his studies all his 
life. But is the benefit derived from the training 
thereby and therefore lost? I hold that if the branches 
have been taught honestly and effectively, they have 
so far fulfilled their purpose, even though they have 
not been carried out as far and as long as we could 
wish. For another department of training it is good 
for the boy to practise gymnastics, and he may derive 
benefit all his life from the habit of body imparted, 
even though he does not continue to run and leap and 
swing clubs. The good I get from my food may con- 
tinue for hours, even though I am not always eating. 
The health I derive from a pedestrian tour may last 
for months, though my life during that time may be 



IN TEE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 43 

very much in-doors. So the training of a boy may con- 
tinue in its effect, even though he is not engaged in 
the same exercises as he was at school or college. 

But it is said, why drill young men in Greek when 
so many forget it after they leave college ? The frank 
and honest gentleman who turns away from Greek 
as from a fetish tells us that he has lost his knowl- 
edge of that tongue. I am tempted to say the more 
is the pity ; but I have to add that I am not sure 
whether he did not get from the literature of Greece 
some stimulus and guidance in the formation of that 
clear and incisive style of which he is such a master. 
And is it not true of other branches, as well as Greek, 
that they are apt to be dropped ? How few pursue 
mathematics after they leave the college, and yet that 
lawyer got from his geometry that consecutive mode 
of thinking which makes his papers and speeches so 
valued ! Only a few practise physical and chemical 
experiments through life, and yet that busy man re- 
tains from his youthful science a knowledge and a 
shrewdness which makes him succeed in business. 
That preacher has given up reading Plato and Cicero, 
perhaps even Shakespeare and Milton, but he has a 
style which was formed on the model of these great 
authors. Whence, it is asked, come these well-waters 
which do so refresh us ? I answer, from the soil and 
the rains of heaven, which have been penetrating 
it, and which are ready to burst forth anywhere. 
Whence, people ask, comes that flow of conversation, 
of writing, of eloquence, for which some are distin- 
guished, and which makes us almost envy them ? 
Whether they know it or not, it was caught from that 
early instruction which they received from living 
teachers. Whence that consecutive thought which 



44 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE 

traces effects to causes, and follows causes on to con- 
sequences? It was obtained by that training in math- 
ematical and physical science which they studied in 
the opening years of their life. 

But while mature men cannot keep all the studies 
of their youth in their busy after-life they should con- 
tinue some of them : say, those they have a taste for, 
natural or acquired, those that may assist them in 
their business, or those which they have a convenient 
means of pursuing. Teachers should labor so to im- 
part knowledge that it leaves a taste and relish on the 
palate, and so that the pupils delight to return to it. 
In teaching languages, ancient or modern, school and 
college should combine to carry on the pupil to such a 
stage that he can read an ordinary work in the tongue 
ad aperturam libri; without this he will be apt never 
to go back to his studies, and may come to look upon 
them with aversion, as associated with drudgery. The 
busiest man may find relief from the burden and pres- 
sure of the day by pleasant and profitable reading, in 
the evening, of the best authors in history or biography, 
in poetry or in politics. He may make a collection 
of plants or of minerals in summer, and in winter use 
a microscope or small telescope, or a well-selected ap- 
paratus for experiments. In these ways he may make 
life more varied and happier than by having his whole 
time and life absorbed in business. The benefit of 
his youthful studies may thus be prolonged into ma- 
ture manhood and old age. 

In this country we have no aristocracy, I mean 
landed aristocracy, such as they have in the old na- 
tions of Europe. These aristocracies, when they are 
not immoral, which, however, they not unfrequently 
are, serve a high purpose ; they may so far have a re- 



IN THE TRAINING AT SCHOOL. 45 

fining influence upon the manners and tastes of society 
generally. But we cannot have such an order in our 
country, and I, for my part, scarcely regret it ; for 
with the good there were incidental evils, there being 
no security that there is a high moral tone in such a 
circle. Of late years there has sprung up in America 
an aristocracy of wealth which is partly for good and 
partly for evil, like the hereditary nobility of Europe. 
The members of it can afford to give large gifts for 
philanthropic objects ; and I am in a position to testify 
that many of them do so, and their wealth is in many 
cases devoted to the erection of churches, colleges, and 
schools, to the purchase of fine buildings, of statues 
and paintings, and the encouragement thereby of the 
fine arts. But in many other cases the expenditure is 
vulgar in the extreme, at times debasing and demoral- 
izing, fostering low tastes and leading to corrupting 
practices. 

But it is of importance in every country to have 
an upper class. These should rise like towers and 
steeples in our towns and villages, like mountains 
overtopping the plains, imparting picturesqueness to 
the scenery, preserving it in the fancy, and enabling 
us to remember it. First, and in front, we should 
seek to have a high-toned moral and religious class 
spread throughout the community like salt to keep it 
from corruption. This, under God, is to be the safe- 
guard to our homes and to the country generally. But 
we need an aristocracy for other and noble ends. We 
must have a highly educated class, trained at our 
upper schools and colleges, and diffusing everywhere 
an elevating influence. These men, it is true, are 
tempted at times to despise the maxim of Bacon, who 
says that a man can enter the kingdom of nature only 



46 HABIT AND ITS INFLUENCE, ETC. 

as he enters the kingdom of grace, by becoming a 
little child ; and falling under the pride of intellect, 
which may be as bad as the pride of life, they may be- 
come self-righteous, haughty, and supercilious. But 
retaining, as most will, the true spirit of science and 
of learning, they will be ready in their localities to 
make provision for every good cause, fitted to educate 
the young and exalt the tastes of the people by means 
of science, of literature, and art. These men will give 
the tone to society in their districts, and keep it from 
being corrupted by wealth when it would foster ex- 
travagance in living, intemperance, and loose morality. 
This is an end, I had almost said the chief end and 
final cause, of these fine old academies in New Eng- 
land, and of the colleges and universities spread all 
over the country. 




SOCIALISM. 




Three words have, of recent years, become very 
familiar, and yet not of less and less, but of more and 
more, formidable sound to the good and quiet citizens 
of America and of Western Europe. 

These words are : Nihilism, Communism, Socialism. 

Nihilism, so far as one can find out, expresses rather 
a method, or a means, than an end. It is difficult to 
say just what Nihilism does imply. So much appears 
reasonably certain — that the primary object of the 
Nihilists is destruction ; that the abolition of the exist- 
ing order, not the construction of a new order, is in 
their view; that, whatever their ulterior designs, or 
whether or no they have any ultimate purpose in which 
they are all or generally agreed, the one object which 
now draws and holds them together, in spite of all the 
terrors of arbitrary power, is the abolition, not only of 
all existing governments, but of all political estates, all 
institutions, all privileges, all forms of authority ; and 
that to this is postponed whatever plans, purposes, or 

1 After the delivery of this lecture, President Walker, at the request 
of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, prepared especially for them an 
article on the same subject for the first number of their new magazine, 
which embodied essentially all that was said at Exeter, with much ad- 
ditional matter in the way of illustration, definition, etc. By their and 
his kind permission this article is here reprinted. 









48 SOCIALISM. 

wishes the confederation, or its members individually, 
may cherish concerning the reorganization of society. 1 

Confining ourselves, then, to the contemplation of 
Socialism and Communism, let us inquire what are the 
distinctive features of each. 

Were one disposed to be hypercritical and harsh in 
dealing with the efforts of well-meaning men to express 
views and feelings which, in their nature, must be very 
vague, he might make this chapter as brief as that 
famous chapter devoted to the snakes of Ireland — 
" There are no snakes in Ireland." So one might, with 
no more of unfairness than often enters into political, 
sociological, or economic controversy, say that there 
are no features proper to Communism as sought to be 
distinguished from Socialism ; no features proper to 
Socialism as sought to be distinguished from Com- 
munism. 

If, however, one will examine the literature of the 
subject, not for the purpose of obtaining an advantage 
in controversy, or of finding phrases with which malice 
or contempt may point its weapons, but in the interest 
of truth, and with the spirit of candor, he will not fail 
to apprehend that Communism and Socialism are dif- 
ferent things, although at points one overlays the other 
in such a way as to introduce more or less of confusion 
into any statement regarding either. 

May we not say ? 

1st. That Communism confines itself mainly, if not 
exclusively, to the one subject matter — wealth. On 
the other hand, Socialism, conspicuously, in all its 

1 M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, in an essay on Nihilism, says: " Un- 
der its standard we find revolutionists of all kinds, — authoritarians, 
federalists, mutualists, and communists, — who agree only in post- 
poning-, till after their triumph shall be secured, all discussion of a 
future organization of the world. ' ' 






SOCIALISM. 49 

manifestations, in all lands where it has appeared, 
asserts its claim to control every interest of human 
society, to enlist for its purposes every form of energy. 

2d. That so far as wealth becomes the subject mat- 
ter of both Communism, on the one hand, and of 
Socialism, on the other, we note a difference of treat- 
ment. Communism, in general, regards wealth as pro- 
duced, and confines itself to effecting an equal, or what 
it esteems an equitable, distribution. 

Socialism, on the other hand, gives its first and chief 
attention to the production of wealth ; and, passing 
lightly over the question of distribution, with or with- 
out assent to the doctrine of an equal distribution 
among producers, it asserts the right to inquire into 
and control the consumption of wealth for the general 
good, whether through sumptuary laws and regulations, 
or through taxation for public expenditure. 

3d. That Communism is essentially negative, con- 
fined to the prohibition that one shall not have more 
than another. Socialism is positive and aggressive, 
declaring that each man should have enough. 

It purposes to introduce new forces into society and 
industry ; to put a stop to the idleness, the waste of 
resources, the misdirection of force, inseparable, in 
some large proportion of instances, from individual 
initiative ; and to drive the whole mass forward in the 
direction determined by the intelligence of its better 
half. 

4th. While Communism might conceivably be es- 
tablished upon the largest scale, and has in a hundred 
experiments been upon a small scale established by 
voluntary consent, Socialism begins with the use of 
the powers of the state, and proceeds and operates 
through them alone. It is by the force of law that 



50 SOCIALISM. 

the Socialist purposes to whip up the laggards and the 
delinquents in the social and industrial order. It is 
by the public treasurer, armed with powers of assess- 
ment and sale, that he plans to gather the means for 
carrying on enterprises to which individual resources 
would be inadequate. It is through penalties that he 
would check wasteful or mischievous expenditures. 

If what has been said above would be found true 
were one studying Communism and Socialism as a 
philosophical critic, much more important will be the 
distinction between them to the eye of the politician 
or the statesman. Communism is, if not moribund, at 
the best everywhere at a stand-still, generally on the 
wane ; nor does it show any sign of returning vitality. 
On the other hand, Socialism was never more full of 
lusty vigor, more rich in the promise of things to come, 
than now. 

Let us, then, confine ourselves to Socialism as our 
theme, the purpose being not so much to discuss as to 
define, characterize, and illustrate it. 

A definition of Socialism presents peculiar difficul- 
ties. 1 The question, Socialism or non-Socialism ? re- 
garding any measure ; Socialist or non-Socialist ? re- 
garding any man, is a question of degree rather than 
of kind. Let us, then, undertake to distinguish that 
quality which, when found above a certain degree, jus- 
tifies and requires the application of these epithets — 
Socialism and Socialist. 

I should apply the term socialistic to all efforts, 
under popular impulse, to enlarge the functions of 
government, to the diminution of individual initiative 

1 " I have never met with a clear definition, or even a precise de- 
scription of the term." — The Socialism of our Day, Smile de Lave- 
leye. 



SOCIALISM. 51 

and enterprise, for a supposed public good. It will be 
observed that by this definition it is made of the es- 
sence of socialistic efforts, that they should arise from 
popular impulse and should seek a public good. This, 
it will be seen, makes the motive and the objective alike 
part of the character of the act — say a legislative 
measure — equally with the positive provisions thereof. 

" To enlarge the functions of government." It may 
be asked, To enlarge them beyond what starting-point 
or line ? in excess of what initial dimensions ? Herein 
lies the main difficulty of the subject ; hence arises the 
chief danger of misunderstanding between the writer 
and his reader ; and it is probably to the lack of a 
standard measure adopted for the purpose of this dis- 
cussion that we are to attribute, more than to any 
other cause, the vague and unsatisfactory character of 
the critical literature of Socialism. As you change 
your starting-point in this matter of the nature and ex- 
tent of government function, the same act may, in turn, 
come to appear socialistic, conservative, or reactionary. 

A person considering the direction and force of so- 
cialistic tendencies may take, to start from, any one 
of an indefinite number of successive lines ; of which, 
however, the three following are alone worth indicat- 
ing: 

1st. He may take a certain maximum of government 
functions, to be fixed by the general consent of fairly 
conservative, not reactionary, publicists and statesmen : 
adopting, perhaps, the largest quantum which any two 
or three writers, reputed sound, would agree to con- 
cede as consistent with wholesome administration, with 
the full play and due encouragement of individual en- 
terprise and self-reliance, and with the reasonable ex- 
ercise of personal choices as to modes of life and modes 



52 SOCIALISM. 

of labor ; and may identify any act or measure, pro- 
posed or accomplished, as socialistic if, under popular 
impulse, for a supposed public good, it transcends that 
line. 

2d. He may take a certain minimum of government 
functions, which we may call the police powers. 

3d. He may draw his pen along the boundary of 
the powers of government as now existing and exer- 
cised, perhaps in his own country, perhaps in that 
foreign country which he regards as the proper subject 
of admiration and imitation in the respect under con- 
sideration. 

There is a certain advantage, as some people would 
esteem it, in adopting the first or the third method of 
determining the initial line for the purposes of such a 
discussion. That advantage is found in the fact that 
the conservative writer, placing himself on the actual 
or on the theoretical maximum of government func- 
tions, can treat as a public enemy every person who 
proposes that this line shall be overpassed ; and can 
employ the term socialistic as one of rebuke, reproach, 
or contempt, according to his own temper. The line 
thus taken becomes the dividing line between ortho- 
doxy and heterodoxy, making it easy to mark and to 
punish the slightest deviation. 

On the other hand, he who takes as his initial line 
the minimum of government functions, which may, in 
severe strictness, be called the police powers, and re- 
gards all acts and measures enlarging the functions of 
government beyond this line as more or less socialistic, 
according as they transcend it by a longer or a shorter 
distance, under a stronger or a weaker impulse, cannot 
use that term as one of contumely or contempt, inas- 
much as in every civilized country the functions of 



SOCIALISM. 53 

government have been pushed beyond the mere police 
powers. 

For one, I prefer to take the line of the strict police 
powers of government as that from which to measure 
the force and direction of the socialistic movement, 
even if it is thereby rendered necessary to forego the 
great controversial advantage and the keen personal 
pleasure of hurling the word Socialist, in an opprobri- 
ous sense, at the head of any one who w r ould go farther 
in the extension of government functions than my own 
judgment would approve ; nay, even if I shall thereby 
be put to the trouble of examining any proposed act or 
measure, on the ground of its own merits, in view of 
the reasons adduced in its favor, and under the light of 
experience. 

In this sense the advocacy of a socialistic act or 
measure will not necessarily characterize a Socialist. 
Socialism will mean, not one, but many things social- 
istic. Thus, for example, protection is socialistic. Yet 
the protectionist is not, as such, a Socialist. Most 
protectionists are not Socialists. Many protectionists 
are, in their general views, as anti-socialistic as men 
can well be. 

The Socialist, under this definition, would be the 
man who, in general, distrusts the effects of individual 
initiative and individual enterprise ; who is easily con- 
vinced of the utility of an assumption, by the state, of 
functions which have hitherto been left to personal 
choices and personal aims ; and who, in fact, supports 
and advocates many and large schemes of this char- 
acter. 

A man of whom all this could be said might, in 
strict justice, be termed a Socialist. The extreme 
Socialist is he who would make the state all in all, in- 



54 SOCIALISM. 

dividual initiative and enterprise disappearing in that 
engrossing democracy of labor to which he aspires. In 
his view, the powers and rights of the state represent 
the sum of all the powers and all the rights of the in- 
dividuals who compose it ; and government becomes 
the organ of society in respect to all its interests and 
all its acts. So much for the Socialist. 

Socialism, under our definition, would be a term 
properly to be applied — (1) to the aggregate of many 
and large schemes of this nature, actually urged for 
present or early adoption ; or (2) to a programme con- 
templated, at whatever distance, for the gradual re- 
placement of private or public activity ; or (3) to an 
observed movement or tendency, of a highly marked 
character, in the direction indicated. 

Such would be the significance properly to be attri- 
buted to the terms Socialist and Socialism, consis- 
tently with the definition proposed to be given to the 
word socialistic, namely, that which causes government 
functions to transcend the line of the strictly police 
powers. 

Even this line is not to be drawn with exactitude 
and assurance, though it is much more plain to view 
than either of the other two lines which, we said, might 
be taken for the purposes of the present discussion. 
The police powers embrace, of course, all that is nec- 
essary to keep people from picking each other's pockets 
and cutting each other's throats, including, alike, puni- 
tive and preventive measures. They embrace, also, 
the adjudication and collection of debts, inasmuch as, 
otherwise, men must be suffered to claim and seize 
their own, which would lead to incessant breaches of 
the peace. They embrace, also, the punishment of 
slander and libel, since, otherwise, individuals must be 



SOCIALISM. 55 

left to vindicate themselves by assault or homicide. 
Whether we will or no, we must also admit the war 
power among those necessarily inherent in govern- 
ment. 

Is this all which is included in the police powers ? 
There are several other functions for the assumption 
of which by the state the preservation of life and lib- 
erty, the protection of property, and the prevention of 
crime are either cause or excuse. 

Foremost among these is the care and maintenance 
of religious worship. It is not meant, that in all or 
most countries the justification for the exercise of 
ghostly functions by the state is found in the utility of 
religious observances and services in repressing violence 
and crime. But in the countries farthest advanced 
politically, the notion that the ruler has any divine 
commission to direct or sustain religious services and 
observances is practically obsolete ; and, so far as this 
function is still performed, it is covered by the plea 
which has been expressed. Eminently is this true of 
France, England, and the United States. Few publi- 
cists, in these countries, would presume to defend the 
foundation of a state religion, de novo, as in the interest 
of religion itself. So far as the maintenance of existing 
establishments is defended, it is upon the ground that 
violence, disorder, and crime are thereby diminished. 

Take the United States, for instance, where the 
only survival of a state religion is found in the exemp- 
tion of ecclesiastical property from taxation, equivalent 
to a subsidy of many millions annually. Here we find 
this policy defended on the ground that this constitutes 
one of the most effective means at the command of the 
state as conservator of the peace. It is claimed that 
the services of this agent are worth to government more 



56 SOCIALISM. 

than the taxes which the treasury might otherwise col- 
lect from the smaller number of churches and missions 
which would survive the assessment of the ordinary- 
taxes ; and that the remaining taxpayers really pay 
less, by reason of the reduction in violence and crime 
hereby effected. 

Now, in so far as this plea is a genuine one, it re- 
moves the exemption of church property from the class 
of socialistic measures. The prevention of violence 
and crime is the proper function of the state, accord- 
ing to the lowest view that can be taken of it ; and if 
a certain amount of encouragement and assistance is 
extended to religious bodies and establishments genu- 
inely in this interest, no invasion of individual initia- 
tive and enterprise can properly be complained of. 

Another and apparently a closely related instance of 
the extension of state functions is found in the pro- 
motion of popular education, either through the re- 
quirement of the attendance of pupils, or through pro- 
visions for the public support of schools, or through 
both these means. 

Now, here we reach an instance of an impulse almost 
purely socialistic for the enlargement of the functions 
of the state. It is true that the plea of a service to 
government, in the way of reducing violence and crime 
through the influence of the public schools, is often 
urged on this behalf ; but I, for one, do not believe that 
this was the real consideration and motive which in 
any instance ever actually led to the establishment of 
the system of instruction under public authority, or 
which in any land supports public instruction now. 
Indeed, the immediate effects of popular instruction in 
reducing crime are even in dispute. 

In all its stages this movement has been purely 



SOCIALISM. 57 

socialistic in character, springing out of a conviction 
that the state would be stronger and the individual 
members of the state would be richer and happier and 
better if power and discretion in this matter of the 
education of children were taken away from the family 
and lodged with the government. 

Of course, it needs not to be said that this is a social- 
istic movement which deserves the heartiest approval. 
Not the less is it essentially of that nature, differing 
from a hundred other proposed acts and measures, 
which we should all reject with more or less of fear or 
horror, solely by reason of its individual merits as a 
scheme for accomplishing good, through state action, 
in a field properly pertaining to individual initiative 
and enterprise. 

There is another important extension of state func- 
tions, very marked in recent times, for which a non- 
socialistic excuse might be trumped up, but for which 
the real reason was purely and simply socialistic. This 
is the construction and maintenance of bridges and 
roads at the public expense for public uses. One 
might, if disposed to argue uncandidly, adduce the 
military services rendered by the great Roman roads ; 
and, thereupon, might pretend to believe that a corre- 
sponding motive has led to the assumption of this func- 
tion by the state in modern times. The fact is, that 
until within seventy, fifty, or thirty years the bridges 
and roads of England and America remained, to an 
enormous extent, within the domain of individual initia- 
tive and enterprise. Even when the state assumed 
the responsibility, it was a recognized principle that 
the cost of construction and repair should be repaid by 
the members of the community in the proportions in 
which they severally took advantage of this provision. 



58 SOCIALISM. 

The man who travelled much, paid much ; the man 
who travelled little, paid little ; the man who stayed 
at home, paid nothing. 

The movement, beginning about seventy years ago, 
which has resulted in making free nearly all roads and 
bridges in the most progressive countries, was purely 
socialistic. It did not even seek to cover itself by 
claims that it would serve the police powers of the 
state. It was boldly and frankly admitted that the 
change from private to public management and main- 
tenance was to be at the general expense for the gen- 
eral good. 

Is there any other function arrogated by the state 
which may be claimed to be covered by the strict police 
powers ? I think that the repression of obtrusive im- 
morality — that is, immorality of a gross nature which 
obtrudes itself upon the unwilling — may reasonably 
be classed as coming within the minimum of govern- 
ment function. Sights and sounds may constitute an 
assault as well as blows ; and it falls fairly within the 
right and duty of the state to protect the citizens from 
offences of this nature. 

Have we now exhausted the catalogue of things 
which may be claimed to be covered by the police 
powers of the state ? I answer, No. One of the most 
important remains ; yet one of the last — indeed the 
very latest — to be recognized as possibly belonging 
to the state under any theory of government. I re- 
fer to what is embraced under the term sanitary in- 
spection and regulation. 

That it was not earlier recognized as the duty of the 
state to protect the common air and the common water 
from pollution and poisoning was due, not to any log- 
ical difficulty or to any troublesome theory regarding 




SOCIALISM. 59 

governmental action, but solely to the fact that the 
chemistry of common life and the causation of zymotic 
diseases were of such late discovery. We now know 
that there is a far heavier assault than can be made 
with a bludgeon ; and that men may, in the broad day- 
light, deal each other typhus, diphtheria, or small-pox 
more murderously than ever a bravo dealt blows with a 
dagger under cover of darkness. Yet, so much more 
are men moved by tradition than by reason that we 
find intelligent citizens, who have swallowed the ex- 
emption of five hundred millions of church property 
from taxation, on the ground that a certain quantum 
of preaching will prevent a certain quantum of crime, 
have very serious doubts about the propriety of inspect- 
ing premises which can be smelled for half a mile, and 
whence death may be flowing four ways, as Pison, 
Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates parted from Eden 
and " became into four heads." 

I do not mean to say that I should hesitate to ap- 
prove of sanitary inspection and regulation, carried to 
their extremes, if they were as socialistic as anything 
ever dreamed of by Marx or Lassalle. For such good 
as I see coming from this source, in the reduction of 
vicious instincts and appetites, in the purification of 
the blood of the race, in the elimination of disease, I 
would, were it needful, join one of Fourier's " phal- 
anxes," go to the barricades with Louis Blanc, or be 
sworn into a nihilistic circle. But in correct theory it 
is not necessary for tne strictest adherent of the doc- 
trine of limited powers to desert his principles in 
this matter. The protection of the common air and 
the common water comes within the police powers of 
the state by no forced construction, by no doubtful 
analogy. 



60 SOCIALISM. 

Is there any important function remaining which 
may properly be classed among the purely police 
powers ? I think not. Does some one say, you have 
not mentioned the care and support of the helpless 
poor ? The experience of the Romans, and even the 
condition of the law of almost all countries of Europe 
in modern times, proves that this is not one of the 
necessary functions of a well-ordered state. 

Is it said that Christian morality will not permit 
that the helpless poor shall suffer or, perhaps, starve ? 
Whenever the state shall undertake to do all or any 
very considerable part of what Christian morality re- 
quires, it will become very socialistic indeed. 

Having now beaten the bounds of the police powers, 
and having decided that all extension of government 
activity beyond those bounds is to be held and deemed 
socialistic, it is proposed to offer certain distinctions 
which appear important. 

And, first, a measure is not necessarily of a strong 
socialistic savor merely because it implies a large, per- 
haps a vast, extension of the actual work of the state. 
Take, for example, the English government's acquisi- 
tion of the telegraph lines, and its performance of the 
work connected therewith. This was not done under 
a socialistic impulse. In England the telegraph ser- 
vice has always been closely affiliated in the public 
mind with the postal service ; and, consequently, when 
the former had come to be of sufficiently wide and gen- 
eral use to make it worth while for the state to assume 
the charge, it was done in the most matter-of-fact way. 
It was no more socialistic than the addition of a few 
thousands of new post-offices to the existing number 
would have been. 

On the other hand, the assumption of a new service 



SOCIALISM. 61 

by the state is not relieved from the charge of being 
socialistic, even grossly socialistic, by the fact that 
such a service is closely analogous to some other which 
all citizens have long agreed to place in the hands of 
government. Take, for example, the matter of " free 
ferries," which has been mooted in Boston and in New 
York, and doubtless elsewhere. This proposition has 
always been greeted by conservative men of all parties 
as highly and dangerously socialistic ; and yet the 
analogy between free ferries and bridges free from toll 
is very strong. A ferry-boat is little other than a sec- 
tion of a bridge, cut away from moorings, and propelled 
backward and forward by steam ; and it may conceiv- 
ably cost less and create less disturbance to navigation 
to use the latter than the former means. For instance, 
it might cost two millions of dollars to throw an ade- 
quate bridge from Boston to East Boston, for the tran- 
sit of passengers and freight. But suppose the point 
is raised that the bridge will interfere continually with 
the use of the harbor, to an extent involving immense 
losses to trade, and that the amount proposed to be 
expended upon the bridge would pay for the construc- 
tion and operation of a line of ferry-boats. Is not the 
analogy close ? And yet I agree with the objectors in 
this case, that the establishment of free ferries would 
be a long and dangerous step toward Socialism. 

Even where the new function appears to be only the 
logical carrying out and legitimate consequence of an- 
other function well approved, there may be a step to- 
ward Socialism involved in such an extension of the 
state's activity and responsibility. 

In illustration, I might mention the matter of free 
text-books in our public schools. Public provision for 
gratuitous elementary education, although manifestly 



62 SOCIALISM. 

socialistic within our meaning of that term, has come 
to be fully accepted by nearly all citizens as right and 
desirable. In discharging this duty, the state, at im- 
mense expense, builds and furnishes school-houses, em- 
ploys teachers and superintendents, buys supplies, and 
gives each boy or girl the use of a desk. Yet the pro- 
position to make the use of text-books free, has met 
with violent opposition ; has been defeated at many 
points ; and wherever it has been carried, is still re- 
garded by many judicious persons as a very dangerous 
innovation. Yet, as has been shown, this measure 
seems to be but the logical carrying out and legitimate 
consequence of a function already assumed by practi- 
cally unanimous consent. 

Still another distinction has become necessary of re- 
cent years, and that is between the assumption by the 
state of functions which would otherwise be performed 
wholly or mainly by individuals, and those which would 
otherwise be performed wholly or mainly by corpora- 
tions. We shall have occasion hereafter to speak of 
the relation of the state to the corporation. 

One further distinction it may be well to suggest — 
namely, that the vast importance, even the absolutely 
vital necessity, of a service, whether to the community 
at large or to the subsisting form of government, does 
not, by itself, constitute a reason for the performance 
of that function by the state. Let me illustrate. In 
his address, as President of the Association for the 
Advancement of Science, at Aberdeen, in 1859, Prince 
Albert said : " The state should recognize in science 
one of the elements of its strength and prosperity, to 
foster which the clearest dictates of self-interest de- 
mand." Last year, Sir Lyon Playfair, in his address 
as President of the Association, quotes these words, 



SOCIALISM. 63 

and enforces the same thought. Yet it does not follow, 
from the importance of science to the state, that science 
should be directly fostered or supported by govern- 
ment. It might conceivably be that science would do 
its work for the state better if the state itself did 
nothing for science, just as many persons who hold 
that religion is essential, not only to the peace and 
happiness of communities, but even to the existence of 
well-ordered governments, yet hold that the state can 
do nothing so beneficial to religion as to let it com- 
pletely and severely alone. 

Still another class of considerations must be borne 
in mind in measuring the extent of the socialistic ad- 
vance involved in any given extension of the functions 
of government. These are considerations which arise 
out of the peculiar genius of a people, politically, soci- 
ally, industrially. A certain act or measure which 
would be a monstrous invasion of personal liberty and 
individual activity in one country would be the merest 
matter of bourse in another. The natural aptitudes, 
the prevailing sentiments, the institutions, great and 
small, the political and economic history of a nation, 
have all to be taken into account in deciding how far 
an extension of the powers of government in a given 
direction indicates socialistic progress. 

Yet, while this is true, there will be observed some 
very strange contradictions in the adoption, in certain 
countries, of principles of legislation and administra- 
tion which cross, in an unaccountable way, the general 
spirit of their people. 

Thus England, whose population is decidedly the 
most strongly anti-socialistic in the world, was for hun- 
dreds of years the only country in Europe in which 
was formally acknowledged the right, the complete 



64 SOCIALISM. 

legal right, of any and every man to be supported by 
the state if he could not, or did not, find the means of 
his own subsistence. 

From the foregoing definition and distinctions let 
us proceed briefly to characterize certain measures of 
a socialistic nature proposed or advocated by men who 
are not Socialists ; who neither avow nor would admit 
themselves to be such ; who, accepting, on the whole, 
the sufficiency of individual initiative and enterprise 
to achieve the good of society, have yet their scheme, 
or budget of schemes, for the general welfare, which 
would operate by restricting personal liberty and by 
substituting public for private activity. Time would 
not serve to canvass the merits or defects of these 
schemes as measures for accomplishing certain specific 
social objects. We can only dwell upon each, in turn, 
long enough to indicate its individual character as more 
or less socialistic. 

1st. The most familiar of schemes for promoting the 
general welfare, by diminishing the scope of individual 
initiative and enterprise, is that known by the name of 
protection to local or, as it is in any locality called, 
native industry. 

Protectionism is nothing if not socialistic. It pro- 
poses, in the public interest, to modify the natural 
course of trade and production, and to do this by de- 
priving the citizen of his privilege of buying in the 
cheapest market. Yet the protectionist is not, there- 
fore, to be called a Socialist, since the Socialist would 
not only have the state determine what shall be pro- 
duced, but he would have the state itself undertake 
the work of production. It is not my purpose to dis- 
cuss protection as a scheme for accomplishing its pro- 
fessed object. Indeed, I should have had occasion to 



SOCIALISM. 65 

bestow upon it but a single word, merely to character- 
ize it as a socialistic measure, were it not for the con- 
viction that the forces of the age are tending strongly 
in this direction. In my judgment we are on the eve 
of a great protectionist agitation. 

And the demand for the so-called protection of native 
industry is to be a popular one, in a degree never be- 
fore known. In England the restrictive system of the 
earlier period had been imposed by privileged classes, 
and was broken down by a truly popular uprising. In 
the United States the history of the restrictive system 
has been different. My esteemed friend, Professor 
Sumner, took the platform, three years ago, with the 
avowed purpose of attacking protectionism, no longer 
as inexpedient, but as immoral ; and he proceeded, 
with a vigor which no other writer or speaker on ap- 
plied economics in this country has at command, to 
stigmatize the forces which have initiated and directed 
our tariff legislation as all selfish and false and bad. 
Now, I can't go with Professor Sumner in this. Fully 
recognizing that our successive tariffs have largely 
been shaped by class or sectional interests, with, at 
times, an obtrusion of mean motives which were simply 
disgusting, as in 1828, I am yet constrained to believe 
that the main force which has impelled Congress to 
tariff legislation has been a sincere, if mistaken, con- 
viction that the general good would thereby be pro- 
moted. Yet, after all, it has been the employing, not 
the laboring, class which has conducted the legislation, 
maintained the correspondence, set up the newspapers, 
paid the lobby, in the tariff contests of the past. 

The peculiarity of the new movement is, that it is to 
owe its initiative and its main impulse to the laboring 
class. 

5 



66 SOCIALISM. 

What strikes me as most important, with regard to 
the future, is the consideration that, while protection- 
ism is to become a dogma and a fighting demand of 
the out-and-out Socialists everywhere, it would be in a 
consummated system of protection that the rampant, 
aggressive, and destructive Socialism, which is such an 
object of terror to many minds, would find an insur- 
mountable barrier. Socialism can never be all we 
dread unless it become international ; but the consum- 
mation of protectionism is the destruction of interna- 
tionalism. 

2d. Another threatened invasion of the field of in- 
dustrial initiative and enterprise is through laws affect- 
ing labor, additional to the body of factory legislation 
now generally accepted. 

There is not a feature in the existing body of factory 
legislation in England which owes its introduction to 
political forces set in motion by mill and factory oper- 
atives. Even in the United States, except solely in 
the instance of that piece of wretched demagogism 
known as the Eight Hour Law, passed by Congress 
without any intention that it should be enforced, our 
labor legislation has not, in general, been due to the 
efforts of the operative classes as such, but to the gen- 
eral conviction of the public mind that so much, at 
least, was fair and just and wise. The labor legisla- 
tion now impending is not intended to abide the de- 
cision of an impartial jury. It is asserted by those who 
claim especially to represent the interests of labor, that 
their class are about to undertake to carry, by sheer 
weight of numbers, measures to few of which could 
they hope to obtain the assent of the disinterested por- 
tion of the community. 

Surely, we have here a very grave situation. It may 



SOCIALISM. 67 

be that the power of wealth and trained intellect, su- 
perior dialectical ability, the force of political and par- 
liamentary tactics, with the conservative influence of 
the agricultural interest, would, in any case, defeat 
legislation hostile to the so-called interests of capital. 
Doubtless, too, we of the class who are disposed to 
maintain the status underrate the moderation, self-con- 
trol, and fairness likely to be exercised by the body of 
laborers. Yet it is not easy to rid one's self of the ap- 
prehension that this new species of socialistic legislation 
will be carried so far, at least under the first enthusi- 
asm of newly acquired power, as seriously to cripple 
the industrial system. He must be a confirmed pessi- 
mist who doubts that, sooner or later, after however 
much of misadventure and disaster, a modus vivendi 
will be established, which will allow the employing 
class to reassume and reassert something like their 
pristine authority over production — unless, indeed, 
this harassment of the employer is to be used as a 
means of bringing in the regime of cooperation, so 
ardently desired by many economists and philanthro- 
pists as the ideal industrial system. 

If this is to be so, there will not be lacking a flavor 
of poetic justice, so far as the American manufacturer 
is concerned. 

The advocate of cooperation, appealing to the ad- 
mittedly vast advantages which would attend the suc- 
cessful establishment of the scheme of industrial 
partnership, might say that thus far cooperative enter- 
prises have not succeeded because, with small means, 
they have had their experiments to make, their men 
to test and to train, their system to create. Let us, 
he would continue, handicap the long-established, 
highly organized, well-officered, rich and powerful en- 



68 SOCIALISM. 

trepreneur system, so that vast bodies of goods, made 
with the highest advantages from wealth, capital, and 
organization, may not be poured out upon the market 
in floods, to sweep away the feeble structures of newly 
undertaken cooperative enterprises. Let the com- 
munity consent, for the general good, to pay a some- 
what higher price, as the consideration for the estab- 
lishment of a system which will, in the result, not only 
secure a larger creation of wealth, but will settle the 
questions of distribution, promote good citizenship, and 
forever banish the spectre of Socialism from the world ! 

3d. Other measures of a socialistic nature, strongly 
urged at the present time, have in view the control by 
government of the ways and agencies of transportation 
and communication. All over Europe the telegraph 
service has been assumed by the state ; and, to a large 
extent, the railroads also have come under government 
ownership or management. In some degree this has 
been due to the suggestions and promptings of mili- 
tary ambition, but in a larger degree, probably, it ex- 
presses the conviction that all railroad service " tends 
to monopoly ; " and that, therefore, alike fiscal and 
military reasons and the general interest unite in dic- 
tating that the monopolists shall be the state. 

On the Continent of Europe the state's acquisition 
of these agencies of transport, so far as it has gone, has 
not been due to popular impulse ; the management of 
the roads so acquired has suited well the bureaucratic 
form of government, while the thoroughness and effi- 
ciency of the civil service has, in the main, secured 
good administration. 

Here or in England, on the other hand, such an ex- 
tension of the powers of the state would have a very 
different significance, a significance most portentous 



SOCIALISM. 69 

and threatening ; while even the regulation of railroad 
management, except through the establishment of effec- 
tive and summary tribunals for the correction of mani- 
fest and almost uncontested abuses, would, according 
to my individual judgment, be highly prejudicial, and 
even pernicious, upon anything resembling our present 
political system. 

4th. Still another suggestive enlargement of public 
activity is in the direction of exercising an especial 
oversight and control over industrial corporations, as 
such. 

The economic character of the industrial corporation 
very much needs analysis and elucidation. A work on 
this subject is a desideratum in political economy. So 
little has the economic character of this agent been 
dwelt upon, that we find reviews and journals of pre- 
tension, and professional economists in college chairs, 
speaking of legislation in regulation of such bodies as 
in violation of the principle of laissez faire. But the 
very institution of the industrial corporation is for the 
purpose of avoiding that primary condition upon which 
alone true and effective competition can exist. 

Perfect competition, in the sense of the economist, 
assumes that every person, in his place in the indus- 
trial order, acts by himself, for himself, alone ; that 
whatever he does is done on his own instance, for his 
own interest. Combination, concert, cohesion, act di- 
rectly in contravention of competition. 

Now, combination will enter, more or less, to affect 
the actions of men in respect to wealth. But such 
combinations are always subject to dissolution, by 
reason of antagonisms developed, suspicions aroused, 
separate interests appearing ; and the expectation of 
such dissolution attaches to them from their formation. 



70 SOCIALISM. 

The cohesion excited, as between the particles of the 
economic mass which the theory of competition as- 
sumes to be absolutely free from affiliations and at- 
tractions, is certain to be shifting and transitory. The 
corporation, on the other hand, implies the imposition 
of a common rule upon a mass of capital which would 
otherwise be in many hands, subject to the impulses of 
individual owners. But it is because the hand into 
which these masses of capital are gathered is a dead 
hand that the deepest injury is wrought to competition. 
The greatest fact in regard to human effort and en- 
terprise is the constant imminence of disability and 
death. So great is the importance of this condition, 
that it goes far to bring all men to a level in their ac- 
tions as industrial agents. The man of immense wealth 
has no such superiority over the man of moderate for- 
tune as would be indicated by the proportion of their 
respective possessions. To these unequals is to be 
added one vast common sum, which mightily reduces 
the ratio of that inequality. The railroad magnate, 
master of a hundred millions, leaning forward in his 
eagerness to complete some new combination, falls with- 
out a sign, without a groan ; his work forever incom- 
plete ; his schemes rudely broken ; and at once the 
fountain of his great fortune parts into many heads, 
and his gathered wealth flows away in numerous 
streams. No man can buy with money, or obtain for 
love, the assurance of one hour's persistence in his 
chosen work, in his dearest purpose. Here enters the 
state and creates an artificial person, whose powers do 
not decay with years ; whose hand never shakes with 
palsy, never grows senseless and still in death ; whose 
estate is never to be distributed ; whose plans can be 
pursued through successive generations of mortal men. 



SOCIALISM. 71 

I do not say that the services which corporations 
render do not afford an ample justification for this in- 
vasion of the field of private activity. I am far from 
saying that, whatever injuries one might be disposed to 
attribute to the unequal competition between natural 
and artificial persons, thus engendered, the evil would 
be cured by state regulation and control. Government 
will never accomplish more than a part of the good it 
intends ; and it will always, by its intervention, do a 
mischief which it does not intend. My sole object is 
to point out how deeply the industrial corporation vio- 
lates the principle of competition, and how absurd it is 
to claim for it the protection of laissez faire. 

5th. Another direction in which progress toward 
Socialism has been made, of late years, is in respect to 
the housing of the poor. In the first instance, and 
this was but a few years ago, the measures proposed to 
this end were covered by a plea which veiled its so- 
cialistic character. Here, it was said, is a railway en- 
tering a city. By authority of law it blazes its way 
over the ruins of hundreds of thousands of working- 
men's houses. At least let the government repair the 
wrong it has done ! Let it put the working-men where 
they were before this exertion of authority! In like 
manner parks are created for the public good, narrow 
streets are widened into magnificent boulevards, al- 
ways through the destruction of hundreds of humble 
homes. In like manner, again, the state, in a proper 
care for the life or health of its citizens, condemns 
certain dwellings as unsanitary, and orders them torn 
down. But what of the men, the women, and the chil- 
dren, who, with their scanty furniture and ragged 
bundles, crouch homeless on the sidewalk as the officers 
of the law do their work ? 



72 SOCIALISM. 

But the demand for the exertion of the powers and 
resources of the state in the housing of the poor has 
not stopped upon this initial line. The views of many- 
persons of high intelligence, in no way Socialists, have 
advanced, during a few years of discussion, to the con- 
viction that the state has a large and positive part to 
perform in respect to the habitation of its citizens. 
It is not in contemplation that the state shall build 
all the houses in the land ; nor, on the other hand, is 
provision for the pauper class at all in view. What is 
intended is, that the state shall set the standard for 
the minimum of house accommodation which is consis- 
tent with health and decency ; building houses enough 
to provide, in the simplest and cheapest manner, for 
all who cannot do better for themselves elsewhere; 
and thereafter to wage relentless war on all " shan- 
ties," " rookeries," and " beehives " used for human 
habitation, to pull down all that stand, and to prevent 
the erection of any resembling them in the future. 

Of course, the virtue of this scheme, from the point 
of view of any one, however favorably disposed, who 
is not a professed Socialist, would depend on the sim- 
plicity and sincerity with which the principle of the 
minimum of accommodation was adhered to. The 
moment the state began building houses for any one 
above the poorest of self-supporting workmen, it would 
not only double and quadruple the certain cost and 
the liability to evil consequences, but it would be tak- 
ing a monstrous step toward Socialism. In under- 
taking such a scheme a state would, in effect, say, 
There is a class of our citizens who are just on the 
verge of self-support. The members of this class are, 
in the matter of house accommodation, almost abso- 
lutely helpless ; they must take what they can find ; 



SOCIALISM. 73 

they cannot build their own houses ; they cannot go 
out in the country to make their home — that is re- 
served for the fortunate of their class ; they cannot 
protest effectually against foul and dangerous condi- 
tions. Nay, the miserable liability is, that they should, 
after being crowded down into the mire of life, be- 
come indifferent to such conditions themselves, ready, 
perhaps, to join the mob that pelts the health-officer 
on his rounds. 

In regard to this class the state may proceed to say 
that neither Christian charity nor the public interest 
will tolerate the continuance of the utterly hideous 
and loathsome condition of things which disfigures 
the face of civilization. The rookeries shall be pulled 
down, the slums shall be cleaned out, once and for- 
ever. For the pauper there shall be a cot in the 
wards of the workhouse, with confinement for all, sep- 
aration of sexes, and compulsory labor for the able- 
bodied. For every man who is trying to earn his 
living there shall be an apartment at a very low rent, 
graded to correspond with the lowest of private rents, 
in buildings owned by the state, or built and used 
under state inspection and control. Lower than this 
the man shall not go, until he passes into the wards of 
the workhouse. He may do what he pleases in re- 
spect to his clothes, his food, his drink ; but in this 
matter of habitation he shall live up to the standard 
set by the state. He shall not make the home of his 
family a hot-bed for scarlet-fever and diphtheria ; he 
shall not, even if he likes it, live in quarters where 
cleanliness and decency would be impossible. 

Regarding this scheme I have only to say, that if 
we are not disposed to look favorably on a proposition 
that the state should undertake an enterprise so new 



74 SOCIALISM. 

and large and foreign to our political habits (and I 
sincerely trust no American would be disposed to favor 
it), let us not shelter ourselves behind the miserable 
mockery of the Economic Harmonies, as applied to 
the very poor of our large cities. To assert a commu- 
nity of interest between the proprietor of a rookery, 
reeking with every species of foulness, and the hun- 
dreds of human animals, who curl themselves up to 
sleep in its dark corners, amid its foul odors, is to 
utter a falsehood so ghastly, at once, and so grotesque, 
as to demand both indignation and ridicule. 

6th. The last of the socialistic measures to which I 
shall advert is the proposal for the nationalization of 
the land. 

Now, I think I hear one half my readers exclaim : 
" The nationalization of the land ! Surely, that is 
Communism, and Communism of the rankest sort, and 
not Socialism at all ! " while the other half say : " So- 
cialistic indeed ! Well, if the man who advocates the 
nationalization of the land is not to be called a Social- 
ist out and out, whom shall we call Socialists ? " To 
these imagined expressions of dissent I reply, that the 
project for the nationalization of the land, as explained 
by John Stuart Mill, for example, has not the faintest 
trace of a communistic savor ; and secondly, while it 
is highly socialistic, the man who advocates it is not for 
that reason alone to be classed as a Socialist, since he 
may be one who, in all other respects, holds fully and 
strongly to individual initiative enterprise in industry. 
He might, conceivably, be so strenuous an advocate 
of laissez /aire 1 as to oppose factory acts, public edu- 
cation, special immunities and privileges to savings 

1 The name of Mr. Henry George appears on the lists of the New 
York Free Trade Club. 



SOCIALISM. 75 

banks, or even free roads and bridges, as too socialistic 
for his taste. 

There is a substantially unanimous consent among 
all publicists, 1 that property in land stands upon a 
very different basis from property in the products of 
labor. 

Nothing has ever been adduced to break the force 
of Mr. Mill's demonstration that a continually increas- 
ing value, in any progressive state, is given to the land 
through the exertions and sacrifices of the community 
as a whole. 

If private property in land has been created and 
has been freed from the obligation to contribute that 
unearned increment to the treasury, this has been 
done solely as a matter of political and economic ex- 
pediency. The man who proposes that, with due com- 
pensation for existing rights, all future enhancement 
of the value of land, not due to distinct applications 
of labor and capital in its improvement, shall go to 
the state, by such fiscal means as may be deemed most 
advantageous to all concerned, is not to be called a 
Communist. He only claims that the community as a 
whole shall possess and enjoy that which the commu- 
nity as a whole has undeniably created. The Com- 
munist is a man who claims that the community shall 

1 ' 1 Sustained by some of the greatest names — I may say, of every 
name of the first rank in political economy, from Turgot and Adam 
Smith to Mill — I hold that the land of a country presents conditions 
which separate it economically from the great mass of the other ob- 
jects of wealth — conditions which, if they do not absolutely, and 
under all circumstances, impose upon the State the obligation of con- 
trolling private enterprise in dealing with land, at least explain why 
this control is, in certain stages of social progress, indispensable, and 
why, in fact, it has been constantly put in force whenever public 
opinion or custom has not been strong enough to do without it." — 
Professor John E. Cairnes. 



76 SOCIALISM. 

possess and enjoy that which individuals have cre- 
ated. 

So far as England and the United States are con- 
cerned, the project for the nationalization of the land, 
notwithstanding the tremendous uproar it has created, 
especially in the former country, does not appear to 
me in any high degree formidable. Doubtless in 
England, where an aristocratic holding of the land 
prevails, this agitation will induce serious efforts to cre- 
ate a peasant proprietorship. It is, also, not improb- 
able that the discussion regarding the tenure of the 
soil will lead to additional burdens being imposed upon 
real estate. Yet the advantages attending upon pri- 
vate ownership, notwithstanding the admitted fact 
that the system sacrifices, in its very beginning, the 
equities of the subject matter, are so manifest, so con- 
spicuous, so vast, that there seems little danger that 
the schemes of Messrs. Mill, Wallace, and George 
will ever come to prevail over the plain, frank, blunt 
common-sense of the English race. 

The important question remains, In what spirit shall 
we receive and consider propositions for the further 
extension of the state's activity ? 

Shall we antagonize them from the start, as a mat- 
ter of course, using the term socialistic freely as an 
objurgatory epithet, and refusing to entertain consid- 
eration of the special reasons of any case ? 

When we consider what immense advantages have, 
in some cases, resulted from measures purely socialis- 
tic, are we altogether prepared to take a position of 
irreconcilable and undistinguishing hostility to every 
future extension of the state's activity ? May we not 
believe that there is a leadership by the state, in cer- 
tain activities, which does not paralyze private effort ; 



SOCIALISM. 77 

which does not tend to go from less to more ; but 
which, in the large, the long result, stimulates indi- 
vidual action, brings out .energies which would other- 
wise remain dormant, sets a higher standard of per- 
formance, and introduces new and stronger motives 
to social and industrial progress ? 

For myself, I will only say, in general, that while I 
repudiate the assumption of the economic harmonies 
which underlies the doctrine of laissez faire^ and 
while I look with confidence to the state to perform 
certain important functions in economics, I believe 
that every proposition for enlarging the powers and 
increasing the duties of the state should be long and 
closely scrutinized ; that a heavy burden of proof 
should be thrown upon the advocates of every such 
scheme ; and that for no slight, or transient, or doubt- 
ful object should the field of industrial activity be 
trenched upon in its remotest corner. There is some- 
thing in the very name of liberty to which the heart of 
man responds ; freedom itself thus becomes, in a cer- 
tain sense, a force ; and those who thoroughly believe 
in individual initiative and enterprise are the best and 
safest judges of the degree to which restraint may, on 
account of the imperfections of human society and the 
hardness of men's hearts, require, in any given time 
and place, to be imposed upon the choices and actions 
of citizens. 

That enlarging the powers of government at any 
point where, after due deliberation, it abundantly ap- 
pears that, in spite of the reasonable preference for 
preserving individual activity, a large practical gain 
to the order of society and the happiness of its con- 
stituent members will, in the long result, accrue from 
the interposition of the state ; that dealing thus with 



78 SOCIALISM. 

projects of social and economic reform will, as so 
many seem to fear, only arouse in the mass of the 
people a passion for further and further encroach- 
ments, and push society more and more rapidly on to- 
ward an all-engrossing Socialism, — I do not believe. 
It is the plea of despots that they cannot remit impo- 
sitions, redress wrongs, or promote reforms, without 
awakening dangerous aspirations in their subjects and 
provoking them to ever-increasing demands. 

To no such slavish dread of doing right are free 
nations subjected. It is the glorious privilege of gov- 
ernments of the people, by the people, for the people, 
that they derive only strength and added stability from 
every act honestly and prudently conceived to promote 
the public welfare. In such a state every real and 
serious cause of complaint which is removed becomes 
a fresh occasion for loyalty, gratitude, and devotion. 



THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT IN 
SCHOLAESHIP. 




" What I am," said Sir Humphrey Davy, " I have 
made myself." He said it quietly, when he was the 
first chemist in the world. Few men have had a bet- 
ter right to say it. Born in poverty, taught the rudi- 
ments by an incompetent teacher, adopted by a family 
friend at the age of nine, attending school but one 
year, apparently strongly tempted to idleness and dis- 
sipation at fifteen, left an orphan at sixteen, appren- 
ticed to an apothecary at seventeen, pursuing his 
experiments, with pots and pans from the kitchen and 
phials from the shop, and a syringe for an air-pump, 
in the garret of his friend and patron, who yet called 
him an " incorrigible boy," "an idle dog," — he had, 
by his incessant toil and study, self -prompted and self- 
sustained, made his way to a position and reputation 
among the most brilliant in the history of experimental 
science. 

Such a man is designated a self-taught man ; and a 
very marked distinction is commonly made between 
such men and men of the schools. The distinction is 
convenient as matter of external history. But it is, 
after all, superficial. The self-taught and the school- 
taught, when well taught, are alike, if not equally, 
self-educated. 



80 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

The point I wish to impress to-night is, that all 
highest achievement in education and culture, whether 
with or without instructors, must be essentially self- 
moved. It must spring from the ardent purpose and 
energy of the student himself. The presence of in- 
structors and appliances is a vast advantage. They 
can interject into a non-receptive youth a very con- 
siderable amount of useful information by dint of in- 
cessant hammering or the process of slow absorption. 
But such a mechanical process never makes a scholar. 
And one is ready to sympathize, at times, with the 
pointed inquiry of an anxious parent, What is the use 
of expending five thousand dollars on the education 
of a five-dollar boy ? The lack of these facilities is, 
on the other hand, a great disadvantage and misfor- 
tune, — which, however, a goodly number have found 
to be not altogether insuperable. And, whether in 
school or out of school, the one determining factor in 
the career of scholarship or culture is the spontaneous 
element, the impelling force within, the personal ac- 
tivity of the student. Whenever or wherever the time 
comes to throw the interest, the energy, the soul into 
his work, then and there is the dawn of all successful 
achievement. 

The times and occasions of such an awakening are 
not the same with all men. When it shows itself ir- 
repressibly from early childhood, as in Pascal and 
Macaulay, the fruits of the life-long yearning and 
striving are apt to be proportionately marked. It was 
in the lowest place in the lowest form but one of a 
grammar-school that Newton, kicked by a schoolmate, 
first beat him in a fight, then beat him in study, and 
rose from the bottom to the top. Hugh Miller's in- 
tense zeal for research began only when, to his lasting 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 81 

regret, his school-days were ignominiously ended with 
a sound drubbing by the master. Paley was in his 
university course when he was startled from his list- 
lessness and idleness by the rough address of a boon 
companion, " What a fool you are, Paley ! " With 
Dean Swift it was later yet. He had received his 
university degree, but only by " special favor," and 
was twenty-seven years old when he roused himself, 
mentally at least, to begin the work of a hitherto 
wasted life. But whenever the dormant energy is 
fairly roused, the intellectual destiny is decided. For 
want of it, how many a youth, borne on the topmost 
wave of privilege, sinks through it all like a stone to 
the bottom ! Not long ago, I read with the deepest in- 
terest the true story of what was called a " brown- 
stone " boy, born to the luxury of a palatial home, and 
ending in ignominy. For I said to myself, That is the 
story of thousands of boys, — not of one. But with 
that inward zeal, how many have pushed their way 
through every obstacle to eminent success ! 

Such a zeal, first of all, inspires the courage to face 
the difficulties of the way. For very many, if not 
most, of the most successful men have forced their way 
through great discouragements. This is certainly true 
of a large proportion of the best young men in the 
Institution with which I am connected. It has always 
been so. I was greatly impressed, not long since, in 
reading a correspondence of two Dartmouth students 
some eighty years ago. It was between two brothers 
who, as one of them wrote, had " aspirations above 
their condition." By the utmost efforts and sacrifices 
the one had entered college, partly through Phillips 
Academy, had graduated, and by his scanty earnings 
was aiding the other, who, with still more distressing 



82 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

sacrifices, was struggling on in his Sophomore year. 
On the 6th of November the Sophomore wrote to the 
graduate : " These cold frosty mornings very sensibly 
inform me that I want a warm great-coat. I wish, 
Daniel, that it might be convenient to send on cloth 
for one. I do not care what color or what kind of cloth 
it is; anything that will keep the frost out. Some 
kind of a shaggy cloth, I think, would be cheapest. 
Deacon Pettingill has offered me fourteen dollars a 
month [for teaching school] . I believe I shall take it. 
Money, Daniel, money. . . „ As I was walking down to 
the office after a letter, I happened to find one cent, 
which is the only money I have had since the second 
day after I came on. It is a fact, Dan, that I was 
called on for a dollar where I owed it, and borrowed 
it, and have borrowed it four times since, to pay those 
I borrowed of." That letter must have been met on 
the way by a letter from the other, reading thus : 
" Now, Zeke, you will not read half a sentence, no, not 
one syllable, before you have searched this sheet for 
scrip ; but, my word for it, you will find no scrip here. 
We held a sanhedrim this morning on the subject of 
cash, could not hit on any way to get you any ; just 
before we went away to hang ourselves through disap- 
pointment, it came into our heads that next week 
might do. ... I have now by me two cents in lawful 
federal currency ; next week I will send them if they 
be all; they will buy a pipe; with a pipe you can 
smoke ; smoking inspires wisdom ; wisdom is allied to 
fortitude ; from fortitude it is but one step to stoicism ; 
and stoicism never pants for this world's goods ; so, 
perhaps, my two cents may by this process put you 
quite at ease about cash. Write me this minute, if 
you can ; tell me all about your necessities ; no, not 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 83 

all, a part only, and anything else you can think of to 
amuse me." And their whole correspondence is sea- 
soned thick with similar utterances of sore distress 
and of buoyant hope. Six months later the Sopho- 
more alludes to the receipt of some " cash " that 
brought him a partial relief, and adds : " You hinted 
to me in your last, that I should have some money 
soon. The very suggestion seemed to dispel the gloom 
that was thickening around me. It seemed like a 
momentary flash that suddenly bursts through a night 
of clouds." Still, a year after this, we find the strug- 
gling graduate writing a cheery word to his floundering 
brother : " For cash I have made out. Zeke, I don't 
believe but that Providence will do well for us yet." 
And Providence certainly did a good thing for them 
both ; for the one was Ezekiel, the other was Daniel 
Webster. Such struggles are not altogether past. I 
have known a young man to enter college with seven 
dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket as the sum 
total of his worldly possessions, and an insatiable love 
for learning in his heart. I do not say it was wise, 
for it was almost a desperate venture, and I scarcely 
know how he did it. I do not say it was unwise. For 
he found friends and help, made his mark in college, 
and will make his mark in life. It shows what some- 
times can be done. There is a marvellous heroism in 
many a young student now. 

Such a spirit of inborn energy gives not only the 
courage, but the power to surmount obstacles. It is 
an inestimable blessing to have high educational facil- 
ities, — instructors and opportunities. Yet these alone 
carry us but a little way. They are the guides, we 
are the travellers. They point the way, we do the run- 
ning, or the walking, — or the stumbling. Some men's 



84 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

hindrances are other men's opportunities. A prison 
is a poor school. But Bunyan wrote his great allegory 
in Bedford jail, and Napoleon in arrest and confine- 
ment, it is said, so mastered the Code of Justinian as 
afterwards to astonish his lawyers. A blacksmith's 
shop became to Burritt the starting-point for acquir- 
ing more than forty languages, and a carpenter's shop 
the school-room in which Professor Lee learned the 
Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Sama- 
ritan. 

But under the best instruction this inner impulsive 
force is equally needful. Inevitably much of the ear- 
lier stages of all knowledge is jejune and hard. " The 
root," says the old maxim, " is bitter, but the fruit is 
sweet." An ardent appetency for the fruit will over- 
come the bitterness of the root. It is this active de- 
sire and purpose which makes all kinds of study and 
research alike feasible. A genuine scholar is capable 
of acquiring an interest in any study or pursuit under 
heaven that he ought to prosecute ; he is but a fraction 
of a scholar if not. And there is no shallower plea 
for neglecting certain important studies than want of 
taste or inclination. Let him acquire the inclination. 
His very defect demands precisely that supply. An 
eminent jurist once complained, bitterly and right- 
fully, that his son in college was suffered to neglect 
the mathematics on the ground of distaste. " That," 
said he, " is exactly the weak point that ought to have 
been made strong." And the power to bring our 
hearty interest to any requisite pursuit, is the token 
of our transition from intellectual babyhood to man- 
hood. I know a young man who, by reason of imper- 
fect preparation, entered college with a strong aversion 
to that finest of languages, — the Greek. But having 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 85 

the true iron in his blood, he heroically chose the 
Greek electives of the college course, threw his might 
into the work, and could be found, not long ago, en- 
thusiastically working out an essay on the felicitous 
collocation of words in Demosthenes, and taking the 
first Greek prize. When such men as these are edu- 
cated, they do not run in a groove. They have all of 
life's activities and spheres open before them to choose 
from. Thus I knew a young man in college headed 
for the legal profession ; but circumstances changed 
that choice and turned him towards a more literary 
life. Within a few years after his graduation, he was 
urged or invited to five different kinds of professor- 
ships, upon any one of which he could then have 
entered. He had his choice and he took his choice. 

And that, let me say in passing, is one of the pre- 
eminent advantages of the long-time established course 
of liberal education. It sends forth, not a man of 
angles, streaks, or crotchets, but a man rounded and 
expanded, flexible and versatile, many-sided and many- 
handed, ready to drop into the sphere he may prefer, 
and in it to maintain his legitimate relations to all 
other spheres. And whatever assaults may be made 
on classical and especially on Greek culture, the study, 
I doubt not, will sufficiently vindicate itself in the long 
run. The best minds, in the effort to place themselves 
in contact with the world's thought and culture, will 
still find it wise to put themselves by that centre and 
clue to it all, feel the quickening power of its marvel- 
lous models and matchless speech, and follow the flow 
of its ever-expanding stream, as it has tinged all later 
scholarship and literature. Such men, as it seems to 
me, will continue to be on the average the finer ath- 
letes, the winners in the race of intellectual power, 



86 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

wherever it may be run. As benefactors, but not as 
competitors, will they have occasion to deplore any 
disparagement of classical education. The issue which 
old Homer set forth in his day will perhaps be symbol- 
ically repeated now : — 

" The men of Troy 
Made head against the Greeks. The Greeks stood firm, 
Nor ever thought of flight. As when the wind 
Strows chaff about the sacred threshing-floor 
While wheat is winnowed, and before the breeze 
The yellow Ceres separates the grain 
From its light husk, which gathers in white heaps : 
Even so the Greeks were whitened o'er with dust 
Raised in that tumult . . . 

Yet the Greeks withstood 
The onset, and struck forward with strong arms. ' ' 

In truth, it takes a man who has had a classical edu- 
cation to make a telling assault upon it. He owes it 
his power. We can afford to applaud the vigor of his 
blows ; they are hard hits at his own argument. The 
shaft is winged with a feather of the old eagle. 

Again, this inner zeal of which I am speaking is 
w r hat gives the best effect to the best instructions. If 
the parents of such men as William Pitt, Addison 
Alexander, and John Quincy Adams bestowed extraor- 
dinary personal care upon the education of their re- 
markable sons, the sons, in turn, responded with still 
more remarkable interest and effort. The precocity 
of Pitt's intellect was not greater than the precocity of 
his enthusiastic application. At the age of seven he 
talked of speaking in the House of Commons " like 
his father." And from that day till the age of twenty- 
one, if there was any one mode of training for such a 
sphere which he had not spontaneously put in thorough 
practice, — elocution, reading, recitation, memorizing, 
translation, profound and critical scholarship, mock de- 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 87 

bates, elaborate study of living Parliamentary discus- 
sions, and the like, — if any one possible auxiliary prac- 
tice was by him overlooked, it would be difficult to say 
what it could be. So, also, while stout old John Adams 
was writing to his noble wife, " It should be your care 
and mine to elevate the minds of our children," and 
both were doing their utmost towards that end, the 
young John Quincy, at the age of nine, was writing to 
his father and complaining of himself on this wise : 
" My head is much too fickle. My thoughts are run- 
ning after birds' eggs, play, and trifles, till I get vexed 
with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep 
me studying. I own I am ashamed of myself. I 
have but just entered the third volume of Rollin's 
History, but designed to have got half through it by 
this time. I am determined this week to be more 
diligent. I have set myself a stint this week to read 
the third volume out. ... I wish, Sir, you would give 
me in writing some instructions with regard to the use 
of my time, and advise me how to proportion my 
studies and my play, and I will keep them by me and 
endeavor to follow them." That will do for a boy of 
nine. But when he adds in a postscript : " Sir, if you 
will be so good as to favor me w T ith a blank book, I 
will transcribe the most remarkable passages I meet 
with in my reading, which will serve to fix them upon 
my mind," — we see already the germ of that fulness 
of knowledge which made him an authority, and of 
that habit of recording which made him so formida- 
ble an antagonist. Still more irrepressible and omniv- 
orous was the literary appetite of the young Alexander. 
At the age of eighteen he was reading with ease in 
ten different languages, and had laid the broad foun- 
dation for the first Biblical scholarship of his time in 
America. 



88 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

Such illustrations could be indefinitely multiplied. 
The inward zeal performs the outward work. Indeed, 
it would be one of the most impressive of all lessons 
to young scholars, could we place before them, so that 
they might see at a glance, the intense enthusiasm 
and tireless toil with which men in wholly inferior 
pursuits have thrown themselves upon their work. 
Even the acrobat or the gymnast carries the zeal of a 
Socrates. Your base-ball pitcher and catcher give 
their mind to it, — often, gentlemen, all the mind 
they have. The great ballet-dancer — Taglioni or 
Elssler — does the same. You remember the alleged 
effect — whether fact or fiction — produced by Elssler 
upon Emerson and Margaret Fuller : " Margaret," 
said he, "that is poetry." "Ralph, it is religion." 
Evidently her whole soul was in her lower extremi- 
ties. Your chess and billiard champions have done 
little else in their lives. The great violinist lives for 
his instrument, and hugs and caresses it like a child. 
What an untold amount of self-moved labor enters 
into the training of the prima-donna or the tragic 
actor, in the whole and in detail. Years of prelimi- 
nary work leave the same ardent zeal of practice ; and 
numberless anecdotes could be given, — as of Mac- 
ready, overheard in a hotel, practising two solid hours 
on the word " murder," and of Madame Malibran ex- 
plaining to a friend how she had acquired a certain 
extraordinary trill. " Oh," said she, " for three mouths 
I have been running after it. I have pursued it 
everywhere, — while arranging my hair, while dress- 
ing, — ■ and I found it one morning in the bottom of 
my shoes as I was putting them on." What invinci- 
ble enthusiasm and exhaustless labor have marked the 
history of musical composers and performers ! And 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 89 

how, when the fountain has been dammed in one place, 
it has burst out in another ! Thus Eulenstein, appren- 
ticed to an iron-monger with an iron heart, and de- 
prived successively of his violin, French-horn, flageolet, 
and guitar, resorted in despair to the Jew's-harp, and 
by four years' practice gained such astonishing skill 
as to command a European reputation. 

The history of high art in every form would show 
the same irrepressible zeal prompting the untiring 
work that has immortalized the men. It was labor of 
love. Michael Angelo studying anatomy and dissect- 
ing like a surgeon, and in his long life of more than 
fourscore years never finding time enough to execute 
the fond conceptions of his teeming brain, and Ra- 
phael filling his short life of thirty-seven with an 
amount of achievement which nothing but an almost 
superhuman ardor can explain, are but specimens of 
a vast company. 

A similar enthusiasm has marked success in litera- 
ture. To cite the numerous and signal instances, 
would be to repeat an oft-told tale. Of the very few 
American writers who, with no tinge of classical edu- 
cation, have attained a mastery of English style, Frank- 
lin and Lincoln are preeminent. Both achieved it by 
their ardent zeal and painstaking, using the best avail- 
able substitute for the process of translation. Frank- 
lin, as you know, was wont to take the essays of 
Addison, — himself formed wholly on classic influ- 
ences, — convert them into other phraseology, and 
after a time re-convert, as near as might be, into their 
original form. Lincoln, as he informed Dr. Gulliver, 
from his early manhood formed the habit of working 
his sentences over and over in every possible shape, 
never resting till he had hit the exact form that told 



90 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

his meaning. And that short but famous Gettysburg 
oration was written and re-written, till by its terse and 
majestic terms it was fitted to wing its way down to 
immortality, by the side of the epitaph at Thermopylae. 
Why should I cite instances of the unwearied elabora- 
tion of style, — as of Pope, exhausting the patience 
of his printers by his endless corrections of proof, of 
Lyman Beecher, spending three weeks upon a single 
paragraph, or of the wit Sheridan, writing and re- 
writing his repartees, even that biting sarcasm, till it 
cut as keen as a razor : " The gentleman is indebted 
to his imagination for his facts, and his memory for 
his wit"? 

If we glance into the field of oratory, what a won- 
derful exhibition should we find of devoted self -cul- 
ture, of success achieved, by nothing short of the most 
ardent purpose ! To give a catalogue would be to cite 
nearly all the great names from Demosthenes to Glad- 
stone. Think of Fox practising every night in a 
session but one, and regretting that omission ; of 
" stuttering Jack " Curran, Sheridan, Cobden, Hall, 
Beaconsfield, after humiliating failures indomitably 
pressing on to success, — and you see the power of a 
purpose ! Indeed, the Reverend Sydney Smith declares 
himself " convinced that a man might sit down as sys- 
tematically and as successfully to the study of wit as 
he might to the study of mathematics, and I would 
answer for it, that, by giving up only six hours a day 
to being witty, he should come on prodigiously before 
midsummer, so that his friends should hardly know 
him again." I think, however, the prescription would 
succeed much better with men like Smith than with 
you or me, — although I may say that I have seen 
men who did try to be witty all day long, and with a 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 91 

success that certainly astonished their friends, and 
might have gratified their foes. 

Let me add to these considerations the fact, that it 
is by this self -impelled purpose that the men of mark 
in every line overpass their instructors and push out 
for themselves. There is always a point at which the 
range of the instructor in any pathway ceases, while the 
field stretches out inimitably beyond. From the van- 
tage-ground of the past the apt pupil peers inquiringly 
into the future. All the men who have advanced the 
boundaries of learning or skill, in whatever direction, 
have had to strike out boldly for themselves. They 
leave all guides behind and become their own teach- 
ers. Who taught Paganini to play a whole sonata on 
one string of his violin? Who taught the painter 
Cimabue first to break away from his stiff and wooden 
Greek models, Giotto to surpass his teacher Cimabue, 
and thus onward to the grand culmination in Michael 
Angelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael? Who taught Da 
Vinci himself to match the angel of his master, Ve- 
rocchio, with another so much beyond it that the 
master never painted more ? 

In like manner have the extraordinary advances of 
science been carried forward by self-impelled men, — 
as, in chemistry from Priestley to Faraday, in astron- 
omy from Copernicus to Lockyer, in geology from 
Buckland to Geikie, — each adventurer first recon- 
noitring, and soon boldly breaking forth beyond the 
fixed line of the past. So remarkable has been the 
activity of these men in devising new inquiries and 
new combinations and experiments, that in some in- 
stances, at least, it would require a whole lecture to 
describe the enterprise of one man. 

The same self-impelled activity has prompted the 



92 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

progress and success of other modern researches, his- 
torical, archaeological, linguistic. Niebuhr's self-taught 
method marks almost a revolution in the art of writing 
history, so as to insure a re-writing of a large part of 
all the past, from the scrutiny of authentic documents, 
scattered hints of contemporaries, local explorations, 
and newly discovered or newly-interrogated antiqui- 
ties. No doubt many a traditional statement is thus 
rendered obsolete ; but, within a generation, what new 
and fresh revelations have thus been made of the hid- 
den springs, the real forces and sources of national 
and human life ! By these indefatigable researches we 
now discern all the complex activities of Chaldaea in 
the time of Abraham, and have a clearer conception 
of daily life in Egypt more than three thousand years 
ago than in Plymouth Colony two hundred and sixty 
years ago. But how much more yet remains to be 
done ! 

What a surprising self-moved activity has in our 
day pushed the lines of archaeology in so many lines 
of mutual helpfulness, till the several paths seem 
almost ready to meet ! Look for a moment at two 
great auxiliary labors in this vast process, — the un- 
locking of the hieroglyphics and the translation of 
the wedge-shaped characters of Babylonia and Chal- 
daea ! What could seem more hopeless than the 
rendering of those strange figures on the Egyptian 
columns, temples, and manuscripts, written in three 
different forms, all alike mysterious. Of the hiero- 
glyphics proper, not a word or a letter was known 
or conjectured ; it was not known that there were 
words or letters ; indeed, men were on the wrong 
track that it was wholly a kind of symbolic or picture 
writing. And if there were a language covered by 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 93 

these mysterious characters, what tongue it might be 
was equally unknown. The language which it proved 
to be was then a dead language in Egypt, and prac- 
tically unknown to European scholars ; and the signs 
themselves were soon found to be not fixed, but vari- 
able, having sometimes many forms for the same 
sound. Here was perplexity upon perplexity, wheel 
within wheel. But an ardent scholarship was equal 
to the task. It skilfully conjectured and isolated a 
royal name, then another, — " Ptolemy " and " Cleo- 
patra," — analyzing the elements, extending the anal- 
ysis step by step in new combinations, meanwhile 
acquiring the tongue in which it was conjectured to 
be written, till by the concurrent skill of many minds, 
and the intermittent progress of many years, these 
records of the past were laid open. Still more im- 
penetrable, if possible, was the problem of the wedge- 
shaped inscriptions of the East. The characters 
themselves looked hopelessly inscrutable, the seem- 
ingly confused and interminable repetition and combi- 
nation of a single form — the wedge — a bewildering 
labyrinth. They represented, as was afterwards found, 
three different modes of writing : alphabetic, sylla- 
bic, and alphabetico - ideographic ; and they covered 
three unknown tongues, — the old Persian, the Median 
or Elamite, and the Assyrian, itself sometimes con- 
sidered as twofold. Here, too, though after a toil of 
many years, scholarly enthusiasm triumphed, and is 
giving us a literature of vast extent. 

Leaving now this broader field, let us take two 
specimens from the field of classical research; and 
they shall be one from the earliest, and one from the 
latest period. Some three and a half centuries ago, 
Erasmus was the first professor of Greek at Cam- 



94 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

bridge University, the first editor of the Greek Tes- 
tament, the founder of the Erasmian pronunciation, 
and the leading scholar of Europe. But see how he 
reached that eminence ! An illegitimate child, early 
an orphan and in poverty, forced by his guardians into 
a convent among dull and sensual associates, happily 
making his way at last to the University of Paris, 
where he maintained himself by private teaching, and 
whence, he says, " I carried away nothing but a body 
infected with disease and a plentiful supply of ver- 
min," attended henceforth by broken health and life- 
long suffering, starting for England as a pensioner on 
the bounty of a nobleman, at thirty almost wholly 
destitute of any knowledge of the Greek and too poor 
to seek it in Italy, at that time its proper home, start- 
ing at last, but robbed on the way, sent thither at 
length by the charity of English friends, — it was 
twelve years from his first visit to Cambridge before 
he returned as professor. Meantime, notwithstand- 
ing the help of Italian scholars, he describes himself 
as mainly coroSiSaKTos, and as giving his " whole mind " 
to Greek literature with such devotion that when he 
gets any money he first buys Greek authors, and then 
clothing. A quiet chair at Cambridge might have 
seemed a refuge from all his harassments. But no. 
He was sowing seed on uncongenial soil. His pay de- 
pended mainly on the fees of young men, few and 
poor. He was surrounded by indifferent and some 
hostile spirits, oppressed with debt, ill-health, and 
anxiety, disgusted with the climate, " living the life 
of a snail in its shell, stowing myself away in the col- 
lege," and at length seeing his little squad of pupils 
disperse before the advent of the plague. He then 
himself took flight to the Continent, feeling that his 



IN SCHOLARSHIP, 95 

sojourn at Cambridge had been a failure. Yet through 
all these difficulties and discouragements he won his 
way to be an " oracle in Europe, to gain the favor of 
princes and courts, and to win a deathless fame " in 
the world of scholarship. 

Just three centuries from the death of Erasmus in 
the fulness of his fame, a boy of fourteen became 
apprentice in a little grocer's shop in the little Ger- 
man town of Fiirstenburg. His father, a poor clergy- 
man, had told him tales of the Homeric times ; at the 
age of seven he had seen a picture of iEneas, Anchises, 
and Ascanius fleeing from the burning city ; he was 
filled with the thought that the ruins of those walls 
must still remain ; and the boy and his father agreed 
that " he should one day excavate Troy." Everything 
but the irrepressible bent of his soul was against it. 
Poverty had driven him from the gymnasium after 
three months' study. His grocer's apprenticeship — 
the best thing he could get — kept him from five in 
the morning till eleven at night, without a moment's 
leisure, selling herrings, whiskey, candles, salt, sugar, 
and the like, grinding potatoes for the still, sweeping 
the shop, and in contact with the lowest classes of so- 
ciety. Even here the passion was still upon him, and 
he hired a drunken and expelled student to recite 
the rhythmic lines of Homer, though utterly unintel- 
ligible to him, and prayed God that by his grace he 
might yet have the happiness of learning Greek. 
From that drudgery he was released only by a misfor- 
tune — an injury of the chest, attended with spitting 
of blood ; he lost two other places in succession by 
reason of that debility and consequent incapacity for 
work ; and, to earn his bread, he shipped as a cabin- 
boy, so destitute as to sell his coat to buy a blanket. 



96 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

Wrecked, rescued, sent to Amsterdam by the charity 
of strangers arriving in winter, without a coat, quickly 
exhausting the few florins given him in alms, he 
feigned sickness to be taken to a hospital. When, at 
the point of despair, a distant friend raised for him a 
subscription of a hundred dollars, and procured him a 
place as messenger-boy in an office. He was nineteen 
years of age. With the mental freedom of his mechan- 
ical occupation — so commonly a blank — began his 
education and his actual life-work. One half of his 
salary of $160 he expended on his studies, living on the 
other half — if it could be called living — in a wretched 
garret, where he shivered with cold and was scorched 
with heat, with rye-meal porridge for breakfast, and 
never spending more than two pence for his dinner, 
and all the while — in his lodgings, on his errands, at 
his waiting-places — grappling with the English lan- 
guage. Though complaining of a bad memory, by his 
extraordinary exertions and singular devices in six 
months he had gained, he says, a thorough knowledge 
of the language. In another six months he conquered 
the French ; and the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and 
Italian speedily followed. It must be confessed, how- 
ever, that his intensity of study interfered with his 
work and his promotion. Good friends, at length, pro- 
cured him a place as book-keeper and correspondent, 
with a salary of $250, — soon increased, for his zeal, to 
$400. Grateful for this generosity, to make himself 
useful to his firm as a correspondent, he applied him- 
self to the Russian language, without a teacher, and 
with no helps but an old grammar, lexicon, and a 
Telemaque in Russian. He read and wrote, and re- 
cited aloud, day after day, hiring a poor Jew dumbly 
to listen two hours every evening to his Russian 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 97 

declamation, at six and a quarter cents an hour, with- 
out understanding a syllable, but simply to cheer him 
on, — and so disturbing his fellow-tenants through the 
thin board partitions, that he was twice forced to 
change his lodgings as a social nuisance. But he tri- 
umphed, as always, and in six weeks wrote his first 
Russian letter, and found himself able to converse flu- 
ently with the Russian merchants visiting Amsterdam. 
This last acquisition soon carried him to Russia as 
agent of the firm, and laid the foundation for his for- 
tune. But, alas ! at the very dawn of his prosperous 
days came the heaviest stroke of his life. There was a 
young maiden, Minna Meincke, who had been his com- 
panion from childhood, shared all his imaginings, re- 
turned his affection, dwelt in his memory, and by that 
memory "filled him with a boundless energy." Though 
her parents opposed, they had met and parted in tear- 
ful and almost speechless love, ten years before. And 
when now, before a brilliant opening, he dared write 
asking for her hand, what was his horror to hear in 
reply that she had just been married to another ! The 
shock by which the fond vision of sixteen years dis- 
solved in a moment unfitted him for business, pros- 
trated him with sickness, and became the sorrow of 
years. He rallied at length to his work. But through 
all his struggles, his business, and his sorrow, the vis- 
ion of Troy and the memory of his promise loomed up 
before him. It was only at the age of thirty-four that 
he found leisure to acquire the modern and then the 
ancient Greek, and after these the Latin ; and not 
until twelve years later yet was he able to realize the 
" dream of his life," and begin his excavations upon 
the classic soil. But how effectually at last Henry 
Schliemann realized that early dream and gained the 



98 THE SPONTANEOUS ELEMENT 

attention and gratitude of the scholarly world, his 
volumes, " Hios," " Troy," "Mycenae," and"Troja" 
bear witness, and the world well knows. And in all 
his hard and trying history there was but one striking 
Providential interposition in his favor, — when his en- 
tire fortune alone escaped in the general conflagration 
at Memel. Otherwise, his signal career has been but 
the steady outgrowth of his irrepressible zeal and 
practical energy. 

It would be easy to accumulate such instances from 
every age and every field of study. But I trust I 
have cited enough to enforce my theme, and to show 
that — whether for facing and surmounting obstacles, 
making effectual use of scanty opportunities, reaping 
the benefit of the best instruction, or extending the 
boundaries of science and literature — all true scholar- 
ship must be spontaneous, self-impelled, earnest, reso- 
lute. Would I might sow here some seed of high 
aspirations, self - moved attainments, and literary 
achievements that should reach far beyond school-days 
and school-studies ! The world is old, but the fields of 
thought are always young. Every new path opens to 
others newer yet. Never was the outlook more inviting 
and hopeful than now. Science in every department 
calls for skilled votaries. History, ancient and mod- 
ern, is largely to be re-written. Archaeology is yet in 
its youth. Linguistics and comparative philology offer 
an exhaustless store of materials. Hebrew and Greek 
scholarship have not yet done their best. Egyptology 
and Assyriology present vast fields of promise. Hit- 
tite, Cypriote, and Etruscan inscriptions are waiting 
to be read. Hindoo, Chinese, and Japanese litera- 
tures are yet to be explored and sifted. Huge piles of 
authentic documents, all over the world, are to be in- 



IN SCHOLARSHIP. 99 

terrogated for the truth. The call for study of the 
Scriptures — their history, teachings, evidences, and 
results — was never more loud and earnest. Biblical 
manuscripts are further to be compared, early versions 
to be critically edited and corrected, and the Christian 
Fathers to be more abundantly explored. The field 
of English literature will never be closed. And while, 
after the lapse of two and a half centuries, our Shake- 
speare is the theme of fresh and constant discussion, 
there is room, if not for other Shakespeares, yet for 
noble writers of both poetry and prose. May the 
ranks of high scholarship in more than one of these 
lines be recruited from your number ! 

And remember, young men, that the opportunities 
are waiting for you. And if there is one thought on 
this theme which the observation of a life-time im- 
presses on me most profoundly, it is that "success 
consists in being ready for your opportunity." The 
opportunity comes round like some majestic vessel, 
bound on a returnless voyage, touching at port after 
port, once for all. The voyager that is ready goes on 
board ; the unready are left. Yes, from every sphere 
of activity comes the loud call for the men ; but, alas ! 
the men do not come. 

But do not understand me to intimate that success 
depends on the greatness of the sphere. That is acci- 
dental, — providential. It is found, not in the sphere 
we fill, but in the filling of the sphere. We need 
give ourselves little concern about that sphere. It will 
take care of itself if we take care of ourselves. Each 
man has his mission. The place it is best he should 
occupy he will attain. In the long run men find their 
level. 



THE SENTIMENT OF KEVEEENCE. 



A primary need of the soul is for something to 
reverence, and this need is the mark of its nobility. 
The cultivation of the purely intellectual element, of 
which, perhaps, we make too much in our systems 
of education, rests on the faith that we have in the 
soul itself, in its capacities, its possibilities of doing 
good things for the world, and also on the faith that 
we have in certain studies, that they will give liberal 
training ; will make the coming man gentle and 
courteous and true and patriotic, and, above all, rev- 
erential. 

When Juvenal wrote, — 

" Maxima debetur puero reverential ' 

it was from a dread of the baseness to which the open- 
ing powers of the mind and body may be devoted; 
from a fear of those corruptions that seemed to wait 
on the birth of every Roman boy ; and it was not 
without a certain awe before the great achievement 
that perhaps lay embryonic in the child. 

Our own Lowell echoes the line when he says : — 

" It is no little thing when a fresh soul 
And a fresh heart with their unmeasured scope 
For good, not gravitating- earthward yet, 
But circling in divine periods, 
Are sent into the world." 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 101 

So Wordsworth : — 

" Dear child, dear girl that walkest with me here, 
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, 
Thy nature is not therefore less divine ; 
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year 
And worship' st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
God being with thee when we know it not. ' ' 

So Saint Anthony, as we see him in the Murillo 
pictures receiving a vision of the Christ-child, is the 
incarnation of reverence and the perfect illustration 
of Juvenal's verse. 

The verse has seemed singular in the denouncing 
old Roman poet, but it brings him very near to our 
modern sight. There has been no great nation with- 
out a deep sentiment of reverence for some qualities 
embodied in personality, pervading the character of 
the people as a whole. The Romans deified their illus- 
trious dead; the distinguished ancestors reappeared 
in the splendor of their highest public honors at the 
funeral of each great man, and seemed to welcome the 
departed to a place among the gods. For these Ro- 
mans the state was the most commanding conception, 
and all individual powers were consecrated to the 
exaltation of the republic. Even the gods received 
honor in proportion to the benefits they conferred 
upon the state. This conception gave an intense one- 
ness to their history, for those who had goodness 
glowing in their hearts. Their goodness was virtus in 
the service of the state, either in the city or in the 
field. The reverence of the Romans for their an- 
cestors, their officers, and the state died out (and it is 
a solemn lesson) when sensuality and lewdness began 
to prevail. When Juvenal wrote the oft-quoted line, 
it was a voice from a sound mind, re-stating amidst 



102 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

the degeneracy of the empire the first principles on 
which Roman greatness had been built up. 

The Greeks reverenced beauty, not a mere sensuous 
perfection of form, but a beauty that expressed inner 
perfections, — courage, subtlety, and power, high, but 
not the highest qualities. They set up statues of great 
men, but they took care that only those thrice victors 
in the Olympic games should have portrait statues. 
What was the meaning of this caution ? They con- 
ceived that the most vigorous and enduring manliness 
would, as a rule, be expressed in the most perfect 
body, and that only the most perfect types of beauty 
should be exhibited to the citizens, the women, and 
the boys. They said, " He who has been thrice vic- 
tor will be more admired than he who has conquered 
only once. And as the triple victor will be of more 
ideal form, his statue will best kindle the reverence 
for beauty and physical perfection so necessary to 
maintain the glory of the state." Thus our rever- 
ence for Greek art, our obedience to canons as old 
as Homer and more enduring than the Parthenon, is 
really a tribute to the reverence of these talkative, 
noisy, curious, subtle, acute worshippers of beauty. 
" The manners of the Greeks," says Emerson, " were 
plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for per- 
sonal qualities : courage, address, self-command, jus- 
tice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest." 
This reverence is deep and intense ; and it is our sym- 
pathy with, or rather our honor for, the things they re- 
vered that brings them so near us and gives them such 
a lasting dominion ; thus Emerson adds, " In reading 
their fine apostrophes to the stars, to rocks, mountains, 
waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea, I 
feel the eternity of man, the ideality of his thought." 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 103 

That was a finer reverence which our old Germanic 
ancestors had, as recorded by Tacitus, forbidding 
them to fashion images of their gods. He says, 
" They call by the names of divinities that secret thing 
which they discern by reverence alone." There is an 
equally fine feeling in the assignment of their divini- 
ties to the groves for their temples, making the depth 
of some majestic forest rather than a frail fabric of 
their own construction the sanctuary of their wor- 
shipped gods. 

Few peoples ever had this quality of reverence in 
ampler proportions than the early settlers of New 
England. There was mingled with it much pride and 
intolerance, but their reverence was not held within 
religious limits, though religion was the main channel 
for its expression. There was high esteem for learn- 
ing, and they founded colleges and chose learned men 
for their magistrates. There was reverence for au- 
thority, and they tried every means that they might 
live in harmony with the mother-country. Faith and 
reverence go hand in hand, and the two united give 
a solidity to human achievement which partakes of 
the very permanence of the universe. Meteors 
with short-lived brilliancy produce no great results. 
Real achievement rests on slow but continuous forces, 
and like the granite foundations comes slowly into 
being, but may rise at last suddenly upon the land- 
scape to add beauty and grandeur for the coming 
millennium. 

Whatever convulsions have shaken Roman author- 
ity, the reverence for law, which was the Roman rev- 
erence, upholds the modern fabrics of society, and has 
its lasting expression in the bridges, the highways, 
the courts, and cathedrals of the world. Whatever 



104 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

eclipse has come over the Shechinah at Jerusalem, 
monotheism and the morality which sprang from it 
are a banyan tree that ever produces the leaves which 
are still for the healing of the nations, and promises 
to embrace the entire globe. The reverence of our 
New England fathers, has it not raised high monu- 
ments in the amazing development of this broad land, 
in its churches, colleges, railroads, and equal states ? 

A nation is to be congratulated when it has many 
illustrious men in its history, to whom the people may 
look back with reverential love. Happy the people 
possessing among their dead a Washington, a Lincoln, 
a Grant. Each such name helps to hold the passing 
generations, with all their new problems and revolu- 
tionary impulses, in allegiance to the ideals of the 
past. One must believe that Westminster Abbey is 
a perpetual incentive to true patriotism ; that beneath 
the constant influence of its noble monuments dem- 
agogues should not flourish. As one walks beneath 
those arches and reads the records of heroes who have 
died in various climes for England and mankind, of 
the statesmen and the authors who have for so many 
centuries been making the English language and ideas 
the most precious literary heritage of the world, one 
gets a profound impression of the solidity of English 
institutions, a firm confidence that widespread, deeply- 
penetrating roots will keep the English oak green for 
centuries to come. 

Nor is it any less true of individuals than of nations 
that permanent fame rests upon reverence for high 
attainments, but rather for great principles and the 
customs founded on great principles, for truth, honor, 
courage, self-sacrifice, chastity, for marriage and civil 
government. When reverence for these is gone from 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 105 

a man, we may admire his military genius or his finan- 
cial shrewdness, but none the less we think of him as 
having lost the finest thing that distinguishes man 
from the brute. 

When Abraham Lincoln, in that memorable contest 
with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 for the senatorship 
from Illinois, a contest extending over weeks of de- 
bate, in reply to a flippant allusion by Douglas to the 
Declaration of Independence, solemnly spoke of him- 
self as of no importance, of his illustrious opponent 
as of no importance, in comparison with that precious 
document, and of the principle of equal rights for 
all men as of more value than a multitude of men, he 
revealed a reverence for justice and for the happy de- 
velopment of a people under a just government so 
profound, with such fervor of eloquent self-forgetful- 
ness, as to betoken to the thoughtful man who heard 
or read his words the foundation of a colossal great- 
ness. Such a greatness was afterwards reared upon 
that foundation, and Douglas, who was at one time 
the idol of his party, known as " the little giant of 
the West," and who received the support of most 
Northern Democrats for the presidency in 1860, hav- 
ing contrived the principle of squatter sovereignty, 
apparently in the interests of fair play, but who failed 
by it to satisfy either the Northern lovers of freedom 
or the extreme advocates of slavery, has now a slender 
fame in comparison with the majestic honor belonging 
to his martyred rival. 

The oft-quoted passage from Kant is an illustration 
of the reverence that dwells with true greatness : 
" Two things fill my soul with always new increase 
of wonder and awe, and often and persistently my 
thought busies itself with these : with the starry 
heaven above me and the moral law within me. . . . 



106 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

" The first glance at an innumerable multitude of 
worlds annihilates my importance as an animal crea- 
ture that must give back the matter of which it was 
made to the planet — itself a mere point in the uni- 
verse — after it has been for a short time, w T e know 
not how short, endowed with vital force. 

" The second glance, on the contrary, exalts my 
worth as an intelligence infinitely, through my per- 
sonality in which the moral law reveals to me a life 
independent of animal nature and even of the whole 
universe of sense, at least so far as the end of my ex- 
istence is determined by this law, which is not limited 
within the conditions and limits of this life, but goes 
on into infinitude." It is the relation of personality 
to truth, to principle, to moral law, that evolved this 
expression of reverence from Kant, a reverence that 
may reasonably be taken as the gauge of his great- 
ness. 

" Honor thy father and mother," says the com- 
mandment, " that thy days may be long in the land 
which the Lord thy God giveth thee." This com- 
mandment and that upon Sabbath-keeping are the 
only affirmative injunctions in the decalogue, that 
wonderfully comprehensive and exact digest of hu- 
man duty. Both of these inculcate mainly, I may 
say wholly, reverence, but not less than the first, sec- 
ond, and third commandments, — so that the first half 
of the decalogue is wholly devoted to the enforcement 
of reverence. It is thus the voice of God that says 
here that reverence is the basis, the foundation of 
noble character ; out of reverence for what is holy, 
true, and rightly authoritative will grow the fullest 
virtue. Our Lord, in giving his disciples that simple 
prayer that has been the most potent symbol of unity 




THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 107 

or an ever-enlarging church, and which on the lips 
of a little child, or arising from a great congrega- 
tion, brings to him who will hear aright convincing 
proof of Jesus' divine insight, postulates reverence 
in man as the initial condition for seeking the bless- 
ing of God. He has no right to ask for daily bread 
or forgiveness who has not first prayed, who does not 
by his constant thought pray, that God's name may be 
hallowed, and that his blessed kingdom may come. 
Profanity, the trifling with the name by which the Su- 
preme Being is known to man, or with that other name 
of the fuller revelation, " at which every knee shall 
bow," — such profanity is the mark of a hardened, im- 
bruted soul. It is to such an one that it was said, 
" If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is 
that darkness ! " 

In every true theory of religion reverence must 
have a large place. When Schleiermacher defined 
religion as " a feeling of absolute dependence," he 
doubtless intended to give reverence due recognition. 
But it was perfectly reasonable for the Duke of Argyle 
to remark, in criticising this definition, that a man 
carried off in a flood and clinging to a log of wood 
must have a painful sense of absolute dependence on 
the log. But no one would think of describing this 
sense as a religious feeling. 

In Mr. Herbert Spencer's striking paper on " Re- 
ligion, a Retrospect and a Prospect," there is in like 
manner a missing of this large element in the relig- 
ious sentiment. Mr. Spencer certainly seems to iden- 
tify wonder with the religious sentiment. That is an 
eloquent passage in which he says : " Nor is it in the 
primitive peoples, who supposed that the heavens rested 
on the mountain tops, any more than in the modern 



108 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

inheritors of their cosmogony, who repeat that 'the 
heavens declare the glory of God,' that we find the 
largest conceptions of the universe or the greatest 
amount of wonder excited by the contemplation of it. 
Rather it is in the astronomer, who sees in the sun a 
mass so vast that even into one of his spots our earth 
might be plunged without touching its edges, and who 
by every finer telescope is shown an increased multi- 
tude of such suns, many of them far larger." I will 
not dispute the assertion that the profoundest astron- 
omer feels " the greatest amount of wonder," though 
it is possible that a supercilious disdain of wonder, so 
far as that word means a confession of limitation, 
often characterizes the learned specialist. But won- 
der and religious feeling are not the same. One 
may wonder at the tricks of a conjurer or at the con- 
fused jargon of a lunatic, but there is scarcely religious 
feeling in this wonder. 

When certain philosophers tell us that there is some- 
thing transcending all personality, infinitely higher 
than any possible personality, they strike a blow at 
the root of all religion. Admirably has the Duke of 
Argyle said, " If there be one truth more certain than 
another, one conclusion more securely founded than 
another, not on reason only, but on every other faculty 
of our nature, it is this, that there is nothing but mind 
that we can respect ; nothing but heart that we can 
love; nothing but a perfect combination of the two 
that we can adore." Adoration and reverence, as pro- 
ceeding from the religious sentiment, involve person- 
ality in the power towards which they go forth ; but 
the substitution of wonder for reverence results in the 
elimination of personality from the Supreme Being : 
the reduction of God to an infinite and eternal energy, 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 109 

from which all things may proceed, but with which we 
can have no more common terms than with the ocean 
or the sun. Can one, except in the loosest sense, rev- 
erence the ocean, its vastness, its stores of life, its 
power, its ferocity? Can one, except in the loosest 
sense, worship the sun, its flames, its vapors, its nour- 
ishing but destroying heat? It was possible once, 
when knowledge was in its infancy, for the Persians 
to worship this great source of light and life. But 
the astronomer who sees in the sun a mass so vast 
that even into one of its spots our earth might be 
plunged without touching its edges, can even this 
astronomer reverence what he knows to be " nothing 
but a ball of fire " ? 

Usually where wonder usurps the place of rever- 
ence, egotism usurps the place of worship. He who 
finds no being in the universe to revere naturally re- 
gards himself as the highest outcome of existence. 

It is a beautiful touch in the sweet lament of Tenny- 
son over his friend to wish that — - 

" The great world grew like thee, 
Who grewest not alone in power 
And knowledge, but by year and hour 
In reverence and in charity." 

The growth in reverence in Tennyson's mind seems 
not, in all cases, to be simultaneous or coordinate, least 
of all identical with the growth in knowledge. The 
philosopher too often lacks the spirit of the little child. 
In a scheme of necessity there is strictly no place 
for gradations, and the primeval polyp is entitled to 
quite as much wonder as the intricately fashioned, 
complexly adjusted man. ■ Nay, perhaps, to more. If 
the perfect man was in the primeval atom, we may 
wonder more how he came there, than how, being 



110 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

there, lie managed to escape. But human nature 
revenges itself, and into the vacuum which expelled 
reverence leaves rushes the self-seeking thought, 
the self-complacency, the egotism, that makes the 
brightest intellect repulsive, because it chills the 
warmth of the heart. " Respect for the divinity 
within man " was in earlier days a watchword with 
Carlyle. But that divinity was revealed at last as not 
necessarily involving goodness. Possibly even the 
moral law was not directive of the unconscious work- 
ing of the genius which he extolled. Do not the later 
publications justify us in saying that his memory is 
less sweet than if he had regarded goodness, moral 
excellence, rather than force, as the highest reality in 
human achievement ? 

The want of reverence is always marked by the as- 
sertion and projection of self. It finds its extreme in 
what is vulgarly called " cheek ; " and this extreme, 
as opposed to reverence, is the curse and badge of too 
much American life. It takes the fine polish from 
manners. An egotism that disregards conventionality 
may be as mean as a cruelty that tramples on sensi- 
tivity. The man or the boy who breaks a written or 
an unwritten law that conduces to the enjoyment of 
society, simply because it suits his wilfulness to do it, 
or gratifies his desire of pleasure at the expense of a 
fellow-being's rights, may sometimes have the show of 
reverence, but little of the substance ; may have ad- 
miration for beauty, but little honor for goodness. In 
one of George Eliot's earlier books, the clergyman 
who removes his boots that he may go softly into the 
room of the invalid proves by that act that he is a 
gentleman, and shows so far his fitness to minister at 
God's altar. 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE, 111 

He who has no reverence for law as an expression 
of the consensus of past generations, or does not 
clearly recognize that limitation is in order for every 
sentient being, will lift his volition in disregard of 
property, and may imagine in his arrogance that he is 
happy. But the mark of Ishmael is upon him, and 
neither high birth, nor learning, nor wealth can give 
him the place of a gentleman. 

Nothing seems to indicate so certainly the decadence 
of a people as the loss of its ideals. In a prosperous 
democracy there are constant tendencies to the extinc- 
tion of reverence. It is an evil hour when the journals, 
the most potent educators, make no discrimination 
as to the admission of items ; w r here everything fair 
and foul is spread out in all its details. But it is a 
more evil hour when the columns are crowded with 
stories of murder and suicide and rape and incest 
and defalcation, and small place is left for the ex- 
hibition of true ideals, for the enforcement of first 
principles, for the statement of the true conditions of 
the world, and for the stories of daily self-denial. As 
now the people are all readers, what will be the effect 
of such a training ? There are newspapers that make 
discriminations; but it is to be feared that the un- 
trained minds choose the sensational, and that a met- 
ropolitan newspaper is led by the public taste to pre- 
sent much that were better unfamiliar to the young. 
The revelations last year of the " Pall Mall Gazette " 
may have been, probably were, intended to promote 
the interests of virtue, but the subtle poison of im- 
purity lurks in the very recital of certain deeds, and 
the enkindled desire to see for one's self what is going 
on, as the saying is, is sometimes, at least, the precursor 
of ruin. 



112 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

In the French Academy there are prizes for good- 
ness. The humble peasant who has shown heroic 
devotion to his once prosperous but now impover- 
ished employer ; the brave soldier who rescues many 
from drowning ; the hospitable peasant and wife who 
have received for years the daily procession of wan- 
dering pilgrims, and fed and clothed little children 
and put shoes and stockings on their feet, are sought 
out and honored with medals and prizes. And when 
the learning and culture of France meet at the public 
session of the Institute, such deeds are recited in 
touching eloquence, and the scholar and the author 
give their applause to the obscure ones who have had 
more than tears of sympathy, even long-continued self- 
denial for the suffering. The newspapers of the next 
day contain these stories, and for one day each year 
there is a break in the Parisian record, and the recital 
of good deeds in a few of the journals, at least, receives 
much attention. The reverence for goodness, as a 
quality in others, will not be wholly obliterated even 
in minds that do not practise it, and in the most im- 
pure civilization there may be seven thousand who 
revere the Author of goodness ; but I fear that the 
few good deeds, honored and proclaimed each year by 
the French Academy, have no great power in evoking 
virtue and keeping the ideals before the people over 
against the millions of crimes that the French jour- 
nals record. A brave deed done in Chicago or New 
Orleans or Paris within the last twenty-four hours I 
would gladly hear, but why should all the world, or 
even all my own country, lay down its crime beside 
my breakfast-plate ? It may not harm me. I do not 
read it, but too many immature minds have their fine 
sensitiveness dulled by this attrition. That public 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 113 

sentiment is to blame for this state of things does 
not make the effect more wholesome. And this cur- 
rent of news is no longer arrested one day in the 
week. This age esteemeth every day alike. The holy 
day has become a holiday, or rather seems passing 
through the holiday stage to become a common day. 
This publicity and exaggerated emphasis of petty or 
foul details has not been without some good results. 
It has helped the civil -service reformers. It has im- 
proved the outward condition of the laborers. It 
has conduced to sanitary improvements, and has set 
up certain ideal standards. But these standards 
were related to physical and political well-being, to 
material comforts mainly. Exhibiting a true regard 
for the rights of man, these journals have taught the 
influential to look downward and outward. They 
have not so much promoted the looking upward in 
the classes whose gospel they have become, or em- 
phasized the value of goodness and the law of love as 
binding on all classes. If you would keep your minds 
pure and maintain the reverence for those examples 
which will keep society pure, learn to pass by the 
worthless details of festivities, intrigues, and crimes 
which the paper puts into your hands, and keep your 
thought and memory for the statistics and valuable 
facts in bringing which to your knowledge the journal 
is of immense service. It would be well to keep a file 
of a metropolitan daily American and of a weekly 
English paper, as soon and as long as you can. The 
sources of the history of the immense changes in the 
world are in these papers. 

When the ideals are once shattered, there is nothing 
more commonplace than their fragments. The Venus 
of Melos or the Otricoli Zeus broken to pieces are 



114 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

bits of common stone. Possibly a distant age may- 
gather up tenderly and recombine the features, if 
they are not too finely pulverized ; but the blind rage 
of the Thirty Years' War reduced most precious mon- 
uments to dust. The question, What is that which 
itself destroys that which it produces ? might be an- 
swered, A nation. In the days of its reverence it 
builds sacred monuments, which in the days of its de- 
cadence it destroys. There was little outward splen- 
dor — the lictors and the rods — about the consuls in 
the days of the Scipios, if it be compared with the dis- 
play of the Csesars ; but there was more honor felt for 
the Scipios than for a Nero, a Galba, a Vitellius, or a 
Domitian. The degradation of the empire was incar- 
nate in such emperors. Who could revere sensual- 
ity, brutality, and disease? Galba's hands and feet 
were so distorted by gout that he could neither open 
a volume nor wear shoes. " Otho," says Tacitus, 
speaking of the crisis of his life, " courted empire 
with the demeanor of a slave." No words to an an- 
cient Roman could have signified greater degeneracy. 
The head of the Roman state fawning on the common 
soldiers, kissing his hands to the noisy mob with the 
demeanor of a slave ! Antony's words over the dead 
Csesar might well express the lament of a noble Ro- 
man in the final degenerate days, if we substitute the 
Roman state for Caesar : — 

" But yesterday the word of Caesar might 
Have stood against the world : now lies he there, 
And none so poor to do him reverence. ' ' 

By such momentous contrasts does history teach the 
value of purity, reverence, and faith. 

It is not uncommon to hear nowadays the demand 
that college prayers be abolished, or, at least, made 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 115 

voluntary, which, I fear, means much the same as 
abolition. 1 In a college where everything else is vol- 
untary, it may seem that there is no reason why prayers 
should be compulsory ; but if the relinquishment of 
compulsory worship should mean that the lesson of 
reverence for the Author of goodness and for his 
condescension would no longer be taught, even the 
thoughtful agnostic might well hesitate to give the 
coup de grace to the requirement of fifteen minutes 
of daily worship. 

An accomplished gentleman, now a professor in 
Yale College, discovered a few years ago, in a book 
in the Yale library, a leaf from a monitor's report, 
giving the attendance and absence of twenty-three 
students at Harvard College for one week of the aca- 
demical year 1663-64. He made of this leaflet an 
interesting paper, which was read before the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society, and printed among their 
papers. It is curious to observe that the absences 
from the Sunday morning and Sunday evening prayer 
are decidedly less than from the morning and evening 
prayer of any other day. But, more striking still, is 
the fact that the absences from the two long preaching 
services on that same Lord's day, between the morn- 
ing and evening prayers, are reduced to a minimum. 
There is but one absence from these two services. 
When one considers that a Sunday service at that 
period was by usage allowed three hours, and was 
rarely less than two hours in duration, and that the 
college prayer must have occupied on the average 

1 It should be noted that these words on college prayers were writ- 
ten several months before the change from compulsory to voluntary 
prayers was made at Harvard. No one could be more heartily glad 
than the author if the experiment there making should result in a 
healthy condition of college religious service. 



116 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

thirty minutes, it is seen that from five to seven hours 
of religious worship, or the semblance of worship, 
were exacted of the Harvard students two hundred 
and twenty years ago. It certainly appears from this 
report that the sickness now so common on Sundays 
in colleges where compulsory attendance on prayers 
and worship exists had nothing corresponding to it in 
those days ; that the Sundays were rather days char- 
acterized by a sudden accession of physical vigor, 
as otherwise the young men who had been absent, 
presumably from illness, on the immediately preceding 
days would hardly have advanced in such unbroken 
ranks to the arduous labors of the Lord's day. That 
such attendance was arduous, and that some students 
were quite exhausted by it, may be inferred from the 
fact that numerous absences are recorded as occurring 
on the next Monday morning prayers. 

What I do really infer from that monitor's report 
is something confirmed by many other signs, that for- 
mal religious worship has now everywhere lost its 
hold, as compared with two hundred years ago. I do 
not affirm that this is wholly bad. I do not say 
that these days are not better than those ; but the 
expression of reverence tends to keep the sentiment 
alive, and I beg you not to believe that there is any- 
thing degrading or dishonorable to any student if the 
institution which he enters require him once a day to 
lift his thought away from merely secular discipline 
for a few moments in the recognition of the Maker of 
heaven and earth, or in honor of the Christ whose life 
and death have made the world so much nobler and 
sweeter for you and me. So long as I uncover my 
head in recognition of the purity and grace of true 
womanhood, so long as I lift my hat before any wise 




THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 117 

and gracious teacher, so long would I reverently ac- 
knowledge the relations which I, as a member of an 
institution, sustain to Him in whose honor and for 
whose service that institution was founded. Nor is 
there anything more compulsory in the one case than 
in the other. I do not uncover my head to purity in 
woman or nobility in man except in accordance with 
the usage of the society in which I live. I may do it 
voluntarily or reluctantly ; but there is a law of so- 
ciety which I do not disobey without suffering the 
penalty. I can, if I choose, be a boor, but I shall 
have the boor's reputation. An educational institu- 
tion not bound by accepted trusts can throw off for- 
mal reverence, and there are many who do it ; but if 
a college is, by its history, pledged to maintain re- 
quired worship, and I enter that college, and am a 
participant in its privileges and its honors, I acquire 
no right to denounce or oppose its worship. It is the 
indifference of our students — and sometimes of alumni 
— to the history of the past and to the opinions and 
enactments of the older and wiser, who have the re- 
sponsibility of historic trusts, that, issuing in a rude 
iconoclasm, causes anxiety for the future. It is better 
to endure a good deal that is irksome than to show 
a complete disregard for the convictions of those of 
whose self-denial we reap the golden fruits. 

I have thought that the students of this decade in 
the nineteenth century are less respectful towards dig- 
nitaries than those of two centuries ago. But it is an 
assertion of the third president of Harvard College, 
Leonard Hoar, that Cotton Mather records that " the 
rectorship of a college is a troublesome thing." It is 
from him that he quotes that that scholarly sceptre has 
more care than gold (plus curce quam auri), more 



118 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

bother than silver (plus sollicitudinis quam argenti). 
" The young olive plants turned cudweeds, and, with 
great violations of the fifth commandment, set to 
travestie all that he said and did." Mather adds that 
" several very good men did improperly countenance 
the ungoverned youth in their ungovernableness." 
Alas ! the combination between good men and cud- 
weeds is apt to exist in every generation. But the an- 
tagonism that may arise against an occupant of high 
position does not prove that the position itself is not 
held in honor. The agitations that convulsed some 
parishes, and now and then a college, with respect to 
the head, were not incompatible with a profound rev- 
erence for clerical authority. A well-known story of 
the Rev. John Bulkley, who was ordained in 1703 
minister of the church in Colchester, Conn., attests 
this reverence : A church, weakened by internal dis- 
sensions and on the eve of an open rupture, applied to 
him by letter for counsel. He replied ; but he hap- 
pened to be writing also to a tenant on a distant farm, 
and, by some blunder, the tenant's letter was sent to 
the church, and the church's letter to the tenant. The 
church was called together and the important missive 
was brought forth. The presiding officer read as fol- 
lows : " You will see to the fences that they be high 
and strong, and you will take especial care of the old 
black bull." The language seemed a little mystical, 
says our narrator ; but one good brother, wiser than 
the rest, soon arose and said : " Brethren, this is just 
what we need. We have neglected our fences too 
long : all sorts of strange cattle have come in among 
us, and, with the rest, that old black bull, the devil, 
who has made us all this trouble. Let us repair our 
fences and drive him out." Following that advice, 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 119 

from that day on the church prospered. Such was 
the honor paid to the oracles and the oracle-givers a 
century ago. 

Such a command over society as these clerical mon- 
archs exercised was, like every other kingship, by the 
grace of God ; and it was only by those divines who 
regarded that grace as the title to their crown that 
such a potent sceptre was wielded. For it is always 
true that the prevailing quality in a mind evokes the 
same quality from others. As iron sharpeneth iron, 
so does wit enkindle wit, so does courage quicken 
courage, so does reverence beget reverence. I recall 
certain actors in the last decade or two whose passing 
from the stage was like the setting of a sun, and 
seemed to the cultured, for a time at least, to leave 
the world in darkness. There was Agassiz, the scien- 
tist, in our own country, the key to whose career finds 
expression in a brief sentence like this : " A physical 
fact is as sacred as a moral principle ; " and whose 
long, busy, and brilliant life was in every act a recog- 
nition of divine goodness ; who died (whether we be- 
lieve in evolution or not, we must admire his opposi- 
tion) fighting for the recognition of the manifestation 
of mind and goodness in all nature. There was Gui- 
zot, the French publicist and statesman, so sure of the 
transcendent nature of mind and of the immortality 
of the souls in which purity and goodness dwell, as 
to have no manner of doubt, in the very presence 
of death, that he should by and by meet again those 
whom he had loved so tenderly, and from whom the 
temporary separation was so painful. 

There was the less known, but intensely loved, 
Clerk Maxwell, the English mathematician, gentle 
and courteous, but profound, who had examined with 



120 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

piercing scrutiny all the hypotheses of science with 
regard to the origin of the universe, and pronounced 
them all untenable so far as they refused to acknowl- 
edge a creator of matter, a personal author of good- 
ness in human life. 

There was Skobeleff, the Russian general, who hon- 
ored his father and mother, who respected the possi- 
bilities of greatness in a common soldier, was devoted 
with ardor to the ideal of a Sclavic empire, and wor- 
shipped God. Such reverent, kneeling figures receive 
the honors of mankind, not those who do not know 
a difference between mind and matter, and who find 
in humanity not merely the symbol, but the totality 
of divinity. 

It was the same of one whose life may be described 
as an aspiration after, and attainment of, communion 
with the God man. It is said that several friends, 
being together, and raising the question whom of all 
their acquaintance they would wish to be with them 
at the hour of death, wrote, each and all, without 
knowing what name the others wrote, Frederick Deni- 
son Maurice. 

So in literature the names " not born to die " are of 
those whose souls were open to the coming of heavenly 
visions, such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, 
Wordsworth. The greatest pantheist in literature, 
thus far, is Goethe ; and that pantheism turns the 
sharp edges of moral discernment may, I think, be 
learned from him. But pantheism is not in all re- 
sults irreverent. The most reverent poem of the 
age, Tennyson's "In Memoriam," is the best beloved. 
The most reverent pictures of the Renaissance have 
the deepest hold on the heart of the passing gen- 
erations. 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 121 

One morning, twelve years ago, a critic stood be- 
fore the Sistine Madonna at Dresden, — that picture 
which has been reproduced in a thousand forms, and 
which is as familiar in most of your homes as the 
name of the short-lived Raphael, its immortal author, 

— the picture in which the mystery of the Incarna- 
tion seems wonderfully expressed in the deep awe and 
love of the mother and the celestial beauty of the 
child. This critic, standing there, demonstrated, as 
he supposed, to an astonished group of listeners (but 
certainly to his own complete satisfaction) that this 
picture is only a second-rate painting, and that the 
multitude who admire this picture do not understand 
high art. But while the song of the angels on the first 
Christmas morning remains the hymn of the ages, the 
love of men and women will abide with this highest 
expression of the union of the human and the divine, 

— with this beautiful symbol of the perfect revelation 
of a Father's love for his erring children. 

Count no philosophy as true that does not include 
love, hope, fear ; that does not issue in honor for 
something higher than pure force or intellect, even for 
goodness. Count no literature as noble that does not 
regard the moralities, the everlasting yea and nay, 
that does not recognize these as the expression of a 
lawgiver. Cold, blase indifference to the old-fashioned 
domestic virtues is not merely contemptuous of so- 
ciety, it disobeys the oracle, " Know thyself," which 
knowledge, if thorough, teaches the reverence of self 
and of one's fellow-man. The human race has in every 
age been busy with discoverable laws and methods that 
have existence in environing matter, but it has also 
studied itself and the aspirations that lay hold of the 
infinite. The solution of the questions pertaining to 



122 THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

environment come later and are of less importance 
than the answers to the questions pertaining to ideal 
relations to human duties. The law of gravitation 
was of less moment to man than the law of love, and 
something like the law of love has found utterance in 
very early thinkers on morals. The inculcation of 
reverence is as old as the monotheism of the Hebrews, 
and has still in their documents most vigorous pro- 
moters. Reverence, as there taught, is the highest 
activity of the moral nature, knowing and admiring 
" the divine impersonation of Truth, Beauty, and 
Goodness : " the supreme, energizing Reason, on 
whom the universe depends. 

Young gentlemen of Phillips Academy, I fear you 
may regard me as preaching you a sermon, but I can- 
not finish this address without giving a little sharper 
point to my sentences. Dr. James Martineau, in his 
recent admirable book, entitled, " Types of Ethical 
Theory," enumerates the primary sentiments as three 
in ascending order : " Wonder asking for causality, 
Admiration directed upon beauty, and Reverence 
looking up to transcendent goodness." All that I 
have said has been intended to enforce this division 
and order of gradations, to make plain that the nation 
or the man, be he philosopher, statesman, author, or 
artist, failing in reverence, — the highest sentiment 
that can animate our nature, — misses the crown of 
true greatness. Young men of your age are not usu- 
ally deficient in reverence. " Hold fast that thou 
hast that no man take thy crown," is a word that 
may well have reference to reverence. If your think- 
ing should be governed only by the search for causes, 
if your reverence should give place to mere wonder, 
you will dwell in the dark caverns of materialistic 



THE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 123 

philosophy, where many in these days are proud to 
dwell, or you will, perhaps, reach a blank agnosticism, 
— a lonely island in a shoreless sea. 

But there is a more subtle danger awaiting you. 
The cold mechanism of unfeeling thought has dwarfed 
thousands, but the admiration for beauty has poisoned 
tens of thousands. Literature and art have their fas- 
cinations, and, when guided by a reverent spirit, are 
incalculable blessings to human life. But so deceit- 
fully similar in outward appearance is the delight in 
beauty to the enthusiasm for goodness, that men in 
all ages have been inclined to substitute beauty for 
goodness. Goodness exacts obedience, self - denial. 
You may be an acute critic without great imagina- 
tion. You cannot keep the deepest reverence with- 
out a good conscience. You may become a Hellenist, 
and your ethics may be merged in aesthetics. Tito 
Melema, in George Eliot's " Romola," illustrates the 
career and tragic end of one who subordinates moral 
excellence to sesthetical enjoyment. Wonder and ad- 
miration were the leading motives in the brilliant 
intellectual life of the Greeks, Did they not give 
hemlock to goodness and ostracize the just? You 
may lament with Schiller the gods of Greece, or pro- 
claim with Matthew Arnold that the Christ is dead. 
Pessimism will subtly tinge your thinking, as you 
linger about decaying pagan shrines or crumbling 
monasteries ; but I am not sure that the virile Titan- 
ism of agnostic wonder is not better than this elegiac 
admiration. Would you be more than seekers for 
causes or admirers of beauty, even men? Then obey 
moral law and keep your highest reverence for the 
Author of goodness, and for that form of goodness, 
self-denial for others, on which He has set the highest 



124 TEE SENTIMENT OF REVERENCE. 

value. Read and study the lives of men who have 
been heroically good. Pay deference, not patronage, 
to the good, to the wisdom of old age, to the purity of 
womanhood, to the confiding sweetness of childhood. 
Do not think that worship is childish : it is manly ; it 
is the highest act of manhood, if the object worshipped 
be supremely good. Remember that " our personal 
ideal stretches wider with the stature of the beings we 
behold." Remember this parting word: The most 
valuable books that have been written for the race are 
the simple lives by the four Evangelists of Jesus 
Christ, because, at the lowest estimate, they are the 
records of a perfect life wholly consecrated to the de- 
velopment of goodness in other lives ; the records of a 
life laid down joyfully with sublime passion and agony 
in the fulfilment of that mission. These books, above 
all others, will develop in you, if carefully studied, the 
humility and reverence that, with their offspring, are 
the noblest characteristics of man. 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UN- 
MADE. % ^ 






There are forms of life, both vegetable and ani- 
mal, including certain races of men, that seem to be 
steadily deteriorating and to be destined in due time 
to become extinct. Possibly deterioration and ulti- 
mate extinction is to be the fate of every form of life 
now on earth. But there are species of life, vegeta- 
ble, animal, and human, that through an indefinitely 
long past have steadily improved and are still devel- 
oping into higher types. This is clearly the case with 
certain races of men. Their present stage in the scale 
of being is every way higher than it was twenty cen- 
turies ago ; no reason yet appears why they may not 
continue to rise for centuries to come. 

Whatever may be the influence of environment on 
progress, whether of individuals or nations, it is evi- 
dent that none ever rise without the attractive power 
of ideals. Rational beings never rise except through 
aspirations after something ideally better than has yet 
been attained. All peoples and individuals alike have 
their ideals, and these determine the steps of charac- 
ter realized by them in life. Ideals and types are al- 
ways the counterparts of each other. Knowing one, we 
may safely infer the other. The type is the index of 
the ideal ; the ideal is the formative power of the type. 



126 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

National ideals and types are, of course, immeasur- 
ably broader and more composite than those of indi- 
viduals. An indefinite number of individuals may be 
taken from the same people, every one of whom in 
character and mind shall present a marked individual- 
ity of type, and yet the wider national type will so 
override the individual as to stamp them all with a 
common likeness. The Englishmen will all be unmis- 
takably English ; the Frenchmen, French ; the Ger- 
mans, German ; distinguishable not half so much by 
differences of language as by diversities in type of 
thought, life, and character. 

Innumerable varieties of ideals, national, tribal, 
and individual, have had sway in the world, and in- 
numerable diversities of character are exhibited in 
history. The North American Indian has had his 
ideals of life, and has presented the Indian type of 
character ; the modern Parisian has his ideals and 
presents his type ; the old Roman of the days of the 
Republic and the Athenian of the time of Plato had 
theirs, and their types are distinctly pictured in his- 
tory. All these, and thousands of others, have con- 
tributed and are now contributing to the ideals that 
are drawing our race onward and upward in its prog- 
ress. But of all that has been contributed towards 
the making up of the higher ideals now ruling in the 
world, nothing is to be compared with the teachings 
of Christianity. Teaching first of all, as a funda- 
mental truth, the blood-relationship of all races of 
men, Christianity commands every human being to 
cultivate, to the utmost of his ability, the development 
of every power of his soul in harmony with every 
other. In no other literature of the world do we find 
so exhaustively comprehensive a statement of all that 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 127 

is requisite to the completest or most perfect manhood 
as we find in the writings of the New Testament. In 
these writings are also brief compends of injunctions 
looking towards the highest manhood. Thus, at one 
time, it is enjoined on us to give earnest heed to what- 
soever things are true, or honest, or just, or pure, or 
lovely, or of good report, and to whatever else good 
men, the world over, have regarded as a virtue or as 
praiseworthy. Again, we have an inventory of the 
characteristics of a perfect manhood in the injunctions 
to " add to our faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, 
and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance 
patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness 
brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity." 
At the foundation of all true character is an unshrink- 
ing faith in the unseen, that underlies and gives mean- 
ing to all that the senses make us acquainted with ; 
and on this faith rests a solid structure of virtues, 
crowned and held together and beautified by an all- 
embracing charity. 

The highest ideal of manhood that the world has 
yet seen now hovers before the minds of the Christian 
nations. But, alas ! how extremely small the number 
of those who ever approximate a realization of it. 
With Herodotus of old, we may exclaim : " Plenty 

of men but few MEN (lloXXol fiev av0po)7roi, oXiyoi Se 

avSpes)." Geniuses may shoot above the common level, 
but they do not fill out the ideals of men. The ideal 
man is he in whom every endowment of his being is 
developed in harmony with every other, and each to 
the highest degree of which all are capable. 

The one great aim of all education is, of course, to 
secure the highest style of men. In strict accord with 
a people's conception of the highest style will always 



128 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

be its methods of education ; and the nearer its ap- 
proach to a realization of its conception, the more ex- 
act and philosophical will be its educational methods. 
The greatest glory of any nation, country, or time is 
its great men, — men who are great, not alone by 
great talents or by deeds of great daring, but by great 
excellence of character and by nobleness of purposes 
and acts. To multiply for itself such men is the great 
aim of a people's system of education. 

The most elaborate training, however, quite too often 
fails to produce first-rate men. Not unfrequently per- 
sons of high mental endowments leave our educational 
institutions crow r ned with academic honors only to 
drop at once into the ranks of the commonplace and 
the forgotten. Criticisms of our educational methods 
abound, and bitter complaints are heard on every 
hand that they fail to secure to those subjected to 
them the efficiency and power of leadership which the 
educated are rightfully expected to possess. Not a 
few of the liberally educated, failing in what they 
have undertaken in life, are sneered at as the legiti- 
mate product of the schools and colleges. They have 
all of the form, but none of the power, of well-trained 
men. They are made men, who have been spoiled in 
the making. And what is it that has spoiled them ? 

The cause of failure doubtless sometimes lies in 
poor teaching. Some teachers have a marvellous fac- 
ulty for repressing rather than educing the powers 
of their pupils. They treat their pupils as the mule- 
teer treats his mules : most approving them when they 
are most passive and docile in receiving and carrying 
their packs. They seem to suppose that the true 
function of the teacher is to impart rather than to 
draw out and stimulate to acquisition. Languages, 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 129 

especially the ancient classics, are too often taught as 
anatomists sometimes teach physiology, solely by dis- 
section. The languages are treated as if they were 
literally, what they often are called, dead languages ; 
as if, having long ago served their purpose as living 
tongues, their only use to us now is as illustrations of 
grammatical principles ; and when they have served 
this purpose to the student, he is left to feel that, like 
the student of physiology with the cadaver when he 
is through with it, nothing else is to be done but to 
shovel the remains out of sight. Excessive doses of 
grammar have destroyed the appetite of many a stu- 
dent for the classics, so that he has dropped them from 
the day he ceased to study them in college. Another 
source of irreparable mischief in teaching is in the 
careless and slovenly work of men who make of teach- 
ing a temporary convenience for earning means to 
take them on to something else, — making it a mere 
stepping-stone to other and more congenial work. In- 
different to everything but their stipend, they glide 
in the most perfunctory way through all their offices 
as teachers, killing by their very indifference every 
springing germ of interest in their scholars. And I 
might add that others still, faultless in all the letter 
and minutiae of scholarship, and with the best of 
intentions as teachers, but naturally inert and self- 
contained, can awaken no enthusiasm in others, and 
succeed only in imparting of their own inertia to their 
pupils. 

But of all places in our country where the ill-effects 
of defective teaching need to be dwelt on, this is the 
last. Indeed, what I have said might be regarded as 
irrelevant and ill-timed were it not that a character- 
ization of the incompetent teaching, so common in 

9 



130 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

some parts of our land, may serve as a background 
on which the favored sons of this institution may the 
more clearly see and appreciate the rare excellence of 
the instruction here received. 

But it is not alone through faults of teachers that 
so many of the educated, so many of the graduates of 
our colleges, find themselves unfitted for success in 
life. Still more frequently the fault has been entirely 
with the educated themselves. And it often begins at 
the outset of student life. The road of the nobodies 
is already entered on when a student is willing to let 
other people do his hard work for him. If he lets 
fellow-students work out his difficult problems for 
him, and unravel for him the mysteries of obscure 
passages in his translations, it will be easy to tell 
what his education will do for him. If he be content 
to submit himself in mere passivity to the carving 
hand of the professor, making no effort to acquire by 
his own exertions, it will not be difficult to foretell 
what he will have amounted to when professors shall 
have done with him. Docility is a prime quality in 
every good student ; but docility and passivity are not 
identical. Receptivity is good ; but receptivity with 
power to assimilate what is acquired, and multiply 
it, is far better. The pupil may present himself to 
the professor like a block of marble to be chiselled 
into form, or he may be like a tree which pruning 
and culture shall quicken into a healthier and more 
vigorous growth. Outward stimulus is all in vain 
without the inward energy that reacts and receives 
and assimilates. A stick may be whittled into the 
form of a man, but changed as it may be in form it 
will still be a stick of a man. Alas, that so many of 
the liberally educated prove to be only half-animate 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 131 

figures into which they have been hewn, or chiselled, 
or carved, or whittled, by the diligent labors of long 
suffering and painstaking professors ! 

And yet, with the utmost efforts to promote individ- 
ual development, it is marvellous how almost uniformly 
the individual is merged in the mass, — how almost 
identical are the mental, social, and moral stamps put 
upon all the graduates of any single institution of 
learning. Any one of its graduates will show you the 
general characteristics of all. All have been poured 
into the same mould, and the native force of some of 
them must have been sadly compressed. Carefully 
observing professors in our professional schools easily 
distinguish between the differing types of mind and 
character coming from the different colleges, — can al- 
most determine with accuracy the college a student 
has come from so soon as they have had fair opportu- 
nity to gauge him. College professors, after due ex- 
perience, can even make some very happy guesses as 
to which of the great preparatory schools a boy has 
come from when they have had opportunity to taste 
the quality of his preparation. Even different law 
schools put a not undiscernible difference of impress 
on their graduates. Theological schools put a most 
conspicuous difference of stamps on theirs. The 
stamps of those of the same communion differ widely. 
It was not therefore a wholly ungrounded caricature 
once made of a theological school, representing it as a 
grist-mill into whose hopper men of the most diverse 
stature, weight, and dress were being dropped, while 
from the farther side of the mill a long procession of 
clericals was emerging, every one of whom was pre- 
cisely like every other in height, and weight, and car- 
riage, and apparel. To cramp a man into likeness to 



132 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

other men, is to cripple him, if not to unfit him, for 
any efficient service in this world. Teachers, like 
rescuers of the freezing, must force their pupils into 
self-exertion if they would save them. 

Young men seeking an education are pretty sure to 
end in becoming mere made men when their ambition 
rests content with doing simply the tasks assigned for 
the recitation-room. Of course, the tasks should com- 
mand the first attention. They are assigned for the 
best of reasons. If needed to master them, they should 
absorb one's whole attention. But the tasks are not 
for their own sakes. Made an end in themselves, they 
are sure to dwarf the doer of them into an intellec- 
tual puppet or a parrot. Multitudes of men are scat- 
tered throughout our country who were admirable at 
their tasks in every stage of their education and in 
every department of knowledge, — who even went forth 
as honor men from the halls of learning, — but who in 
all effective work in human society are hopeless fail- 
ures. You find them at the bar and you find them in 
the pulpit ; professors chairs are not without them ; 
and they are not wanting in the halls of legislation, — 
admirably carved semblances of cultivated manhood, 
having all the shape and comeliness but not a whit of 
the living power of well-trained intellects. For them 
the work of the college and the schools was its own 
end ; when it was finished they had " attained." They 
rested on their laurels. Their education, so far from 
fitting, simply unfitted them for the work which a 
waiting world had a right to expect from them. 

The modern text-book and the misuse of it must 
not be forgotten in our search for an explanation of 
the many cases of inefficiency among the liberally ed- 
ucated. Countless text-books with endless " improve- 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 133 

ments " is one of the most striking features of our 
modern methods of education. Eeliance on text- 
books, with verbal recitations from them, is a special 
characteristic of prevailing methods of instruction. 
To recite from them accurately is, with many teachers, 
the sole test of perfect scholarship. Boys get the idea 
that the contents of the text-books concern them only 
as lessons for recitation, and that when the lessons 
have been learned the book will be of no more ser- 
vice to them than an old hat that has served its day. 
They get a sort of vague impression that all text- 
books, with their contents, have been made solely for 
school purposes. It was not a hopelessly stupid boy 
who asked if Professor Lincoln did not write the 
"Livy " which he had edited; and, if he did write it, 
why he made so many sentences that are obscure and 
difficult to translate ? In extreme reliance on text- 
books verbal memory is cultivated to the comparative 
neglect of the other powers. And it is curious what a 
trick the memory has of retaining just so long as it is 
charged to do so and no longer, whatever is intrusted 
to it to be reproduced at a set time or on a given oc- 
casion. A lesson learned only for the recitation-room 
will be remembered till recited, and no longer. Hence 
the desperate crammings just prior to the term exam- 
inations. The empty mind is crowded with materials 
that the examinations will call for, and the memory 
will hold them till the examination is past, and then 
drop them. And hence, furthermore, the absurdity of 
relying solely on final examinations, however minute 
and extended, for determining either the amount and 
value of his acquisitions, or the degree of his mental 
discipline. And the absurdity is the same whatever 
the method of instruction, whether by text-book or by 



134 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

lectures. Of all the methods yet devised for build- 
ing up the hollow shells of manhood, — for moulding 
blank images of the real, — none has yet been devised 
comparable to the practice of relying on formal and 
final examinations, — examinations the sole prepara- 
tion for which is special and elaborate cramming. 

A partial corrective of many of the defects in our 
educational methods is sometimes very effectually ad- 
ministered by students themselves to one another. I 
mean the free, frank way in which they handle each 
other in their mutual criticisms. None are quicker 
than they to detect shams ; none more prompt to 
puncture pretence ; none more merciless, and, as a 
rule, none more just in their criticisms ; and, to a 
healthy - minded boy, no criticisms are more whole- 
some. A boy that has run the gauntlet of criticisms 
from his fellow-students has received a training for 
the longer race of life that can come from no other 
source. He discovers that it is not so much what 
books and lessons are making of him that is criticized 
as it is what through use of books and lessons he is 
making of himself. It is a great and most useful dis- 
covery that a boy makes when the rough usage of his 
fellows awakens within him a sense of self-reliance 
and transforms a quietly receptive spirit into an 
eagerly acquisitive. Many a boy is saved by it from 
becoming a mere mummified product of formal teach- 
ing. 

Much has been said and written in praise of self- 
made men, as contradistinguished from the college- 
bred. We are often reminded that many of the 
fathers of the American Republic were innocent of 
every form of academic training ; that Patrick Henry, 
and Roger Sherman, and Benjamin Franklin, and 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 135 

many others who did efficient service in laying the 
foundations of our national government were, in the 
strictest sense, self-made men; that Chief - Justice 
Marshall, the greatest jurist yet on the bench of the 
supreme court of the nation, was indebted to no col- 
lege for his distinction ; that George Washington, and 
Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, and a host of 
lesser lights who have effectually served the Republic, 
were indebted to no academy or college in fitting 
themselves for their services ; that Faraday, in Eng- 
land, the largest contributor to the advancement of 
science in his day, and some of England's greatest 
civil engineers, as well as Horace Greeley and Thur- 
low Weed, two of the most distinguished of American 
journalists, all came up from lowly estates, not through 
the doorways of colleges, but by solitary vigils and by 
struggles with poverty and ignorance ; and that in the 
highest councils of the American people to-day some 
of the leading minds are those that have known noth- 
ing of the training of the schools. 

The largeness of the proportion of the self-made 
to the liberally educated in our national councils is 
one of the noteworthy signs of our time, and all the 
more remarkable that so large number of them are 
from states where colleges abound. Not a few of our 
United States senators have been, and still are, men 
who, with the very slender provisions of a common- 
school education, have worked themselves up, from the 
plough or from apprenticeships or clerkships, into the 
acquisition of kinds and degrees of knowledge that 
have given them a commanding influence with their 
college-bred associates. And it does not suffice to say 
that they got themselves elected through means to 
which the college-bred would not descend. Doubtless, 



136 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

American politics are too often a dirty trade in which 
the right - minded and clean-handed will not engage. 
Intrigue and manoeuvre may get one elected, but they 
never can endow with the attributes of statesmanship ; 
they never can give preeminence of intellect and 
knowledge. And men soon find their level in the 
Senate, as they do elsewhere when associated with 
their peers. Nor, again, does it quite suffice to say 
that the really able men who have been liberally edu- 
cated refuse to enter political life on account of the 
disagreeableness of the service, or that they are less 
acceptable to the great mass of electors than the self- 
trained. The truth is, our ablest men are not unwil- 
ling to serve the state, and, with rarest exceptions, the 
ruling parties are always glad enough to be repre- 
sented by the ablest men they can find. 

But a formal distinction between the self-made man 
and the educated is not a just one, and is misleading. 
All real education is necessarily in one sense self-edu- 
cation. Every man, the making of whom results in 
anything creditable, is in a real sense a self-made 
man. It matters not what one's natural endowments 
may be, nor what the advantages or disadvantages of 
his condition in life, if he ever rises to a well-devel- 
oped and efficient manhood, it will be by his own exer- 
tions. His energy will be self-developed, his ability 
self -acquired, his mental resources accumulated by his 
own toil. Under God he will be his own maker. 

And it stands to reason that one's progress under 
good teachers will always be safer and swifter than if 
he grope his way by himself alone. With due self- 
exertion, the more and the better his teachers, the far- 
ther will he advance and the wider will be his vision 
as he goes on. The advantage of the academy and 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 137 

the college is not that they make men, but that they 
greatly hasten the process of self -making. They are 
both time-saving and labor-saving; but that is all. 
The man who unclerstandingly begins life with their 
help starts with immense advantage over him who 
begins single-handed. Other methods of education 
than those of the schools give them time enough, 
will develop intellect and character ; but they are 
methods which are more laborious and circuitous, 
and uncertain in their results. No sensible man who 
has educated himself without the aid of the schools, 
whatever the degree of his self-developed energy and 
strength or the extent of his knowledge, can fail to 
see how time might have been saved by good teachers, 
and how certain defects of character might have been 
remedied by association with classmates. It is a sig- 
nificant fact that the so-called self-made men are very 
willing their sons should have the advantages of a 
liberal education. 

But the full advantages of the academy and the 
college come only on conditions which the student 
himself alone can supply. They can be thrust on no 
one ; no one can supply them except by strenuous 
effort. Let us notice for a moment what some of 
these are. 

The first of them is a mastery of whatever is pro- 
fessedly learned. A fatal error at any stage of educa- 
tion, and under any method of it, is contentment with 
a half understanding of what one has in hand. It is 
an error that repeats and multiplies itself at every 
successive step. The boy who is content to know 
only in part, and to guess at the rest, is certain to end 
in becoming a man who is never sure of anything. 
The boy who leads in school and in college, and after- 



138 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

wards, if true to himself, may lead in the community 
and the state, is the boy who is satisfied with nothing 
but exact knowledge, and completeness of knowledge, 
so far as attainable, of whatever he undertakes to 
learn. He is not the boy who is content with know- 
ing just enough of his lesson to pass muster in the 
recitation-room. He masters it, and, having mastered 
it once, has mastered it for life. Every advancing 
step is amid increasing light and with a growing sense 
of victory. He makes himself. Men who, under 
teachers or without them, have ever come to anything 
really valuable in this world, have always been men 
who were intent on knowing what they undertook to 
learn, and on mastering what they undertook to ac- 
quire. They studied, not merely to pass with a teacher, 
but to acquire the real knowledge which alone could 
carry them whither they wished to ascend. Faraday, 
the poor newspaper carrier and apprentice boy, attend- 
ing lectures on natural philosophy through the charity 
of an elder brother, was eager to understand all that 
could be known on the subjects discussed, and be- 
came, by his persistency, the most successful experi- 
menter and discoverer in science of his time. Benja- 
min Franklin, the apprentice printer boy, wished to 
improve himself in English composition, bought an 
odd volume of the " Spectator," read and re-read its 
essays with closest attention; reading carefully an 
essay to-day and noting its thoughts, he would try 
several days afterwards to reproduce it in language of 
his own, comparing his reproduction with the original 
for correction, and he became the master of an easy, 
natural style and a voluminous writer. If more of our 
boys in the schools, of the same age that Franklin was 
when he did this (in his fifteenth year), would work 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 139 

with equal diligence and patience in improving their 
style of writing, fewer of them, at their graduation 
from college, would make the wretched work so often 
made in the use of their mother tongue. Nothing is 
ever really mastered without an unyielding determina- 
tion, and it is marvellous what a resolute purpose can 
accomplish. Joseph Justus Scaliger went, in his nine- 
teenth year, to Paris to study Greek under the instruc- 
tion of the noted Turnebus. Soon rinding his progress 
too slow to be satisfactory, he shut himself up in his 
chamber, mastered Homer, we are told, in twenty-one 
days, and within two years all the classical Greek ex- 
tant, — having committed all the poets to memory. 
I cannot say that I believe Scaliger did all this, prod- 
igy as he was in memory ; but every one who, while 
learning lessons in a language, is intent on mastering 
the language itself, will speedily find how great is the 
difference between being made and making one's self 
a scholar. Be not afraid, therefore, young gentlemen, 
of committing your Homer and your Horace to memory 
and spouting their verses in the fields and reciting 
them to one another in your walks. So learned, they 
will be yours so long as your days shall last. 

Another condition requisite to effective self-making 
is, never to cower in one's studies before any difficul- 
ties however great. To rely on others is fatal. To 
clear up one obscurity by your own penetration is 
worth more to you than to have a dozen made lumi- 
nous by the intelligence of another. He who once 
learns to untie knots and remove difficulties for him- 
self soon finds that they become increasingly rare as 
he advances ; he who asks others to remove his obsta- 
cles for him soon finds them multiplying as he pro- 
ceeds. A healthy self-reliance is rarely, if ever, want- 



140 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE , AND UNMADE. 

ing in self-made men whose making has resulted in 
anything worth speaking of. And it never is found 
in men who rely on others to do their hard things for 
them. Strength and self-reliance, like everything else 
in the human soul, grow by use, and nothing calls 
them into use like courageously facing and overcom- 
ing whatever taxes intellect and patience in their re- 
moval. It certainly is not the easiest studies that 
most develop strength of intellect, and it is not the 
most difficult that bring out the finer mental graces. 
Harmony of studies alone gives harmony of mental 
traits. Men who are self-made outside of the schools 
give their attention successfully to one study or an- 
other, according as they discover in themselves some 
gaping deficiency. Abraham Lincoln said of himself : 
" When I came of age I did not know much. The 
little advance that I now (1859) have upon this store 
of education I have picked up from time to time 
under the pressure of necessity." Without the aid of 
masters and professors the disadvantages under which 
one labors in getting an education are almost incom- 
putable ; in a well-ordered academy and college, where 
the various branches of knowledge are so adjusted to 
one another that instruction in each comes at the right 
time, the advantages to a student are beyond estimate ; 
but neither in the one case nor the other can a sym- 
metrical intellect and character ever be developed ex- 
cept through an energy of purpose that will not shrink 
from the severest toil. 

Again, a habit of clear thinking is always indispen- 
sable in developing a high order of intellect, whether 
under teachers or without them. Clear thought for 
the mind, like pure air for the lungs, always invigor- 
ates. A boy who is content with seeing things ob- 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 141 

scurely will go into life with an obtuse mental vision, 
that will betray him into endless blunders. To hear 
or read the renderings sometimes made of Greek and 
Latin into English, one would think the old Greeks 
and Romans must have been a very muddy-minded peo- 
ple : whereas, of all men who ever used language, none 
probably were ever more lucid and exact in express- 
ing their thoughts ; and no languages were ever better 
fitted for precision than the Latin, or for express- 
ing all of the endlessly varying shades of thought of 
which mind is capable than the Greek. No man ever 
comes into possession of real mental power, or of men- 
tal resources worth having, who has not been accus- 
tomed to exact attention to whatever engages him, 
and to exact statement to himself of what he thinks 
he has learned. From the penalty of inattention and 
careless observation there is no escape. Nature, al- 
ways punctiliously exact in all her operations, is merci- 
lessly impatient of every slovenly son of man who is 
inattentive to her laws, whether of matter or of mind ; 
kindly to the studious, she is ever ready to disclose 
to him her secrets. Some of her laws are so plainly 
written that all who run may read them ; others are 
so hidden that only the inquisitive and clear-sighted 
see them. Depth and clearness of insight, decisive 
marks of trained intellect, come only to him who as- 
siduously seeks to acquire them. Good teaching may 
assist in the acquisition ; but they never are acquired 
except by persistent endeavor. Nothing contributes 
more directly to their acquisition than earnest discus- 
sions with fellow -students. Intellects in collision 
sharpen each other and whet thoughts into precision. 
Sir James Mackintosh and Robert Hall, two of the 
brightest intellects of their day, were fellow- students 



142 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

at Aberdeen. Month after month they read together, 
and " debated with the utmost intensity " questions 
suggested by their reading. Both of them were ac- 
customed in after-years to refer to these discussions 
as having been to them of the utmost value. 

But whatever the process and whatever the product 
in the making of men, one of the saddest aspects of 
human life is the number of the well-made who finally 
unmake themselves, and end their days in ultimate 
ruin of both mind and character. But let it ever be 
remembered that personal ruin comes neither by fate 
nor by fiat. Not even omnipotence can destroy rightly 
built character. No lightning bolt can shatter it, no 
flood drown it, no fire consume it. It is indestructible, 
except by him who has formed it. Only the man him- 
self can destroy himself. Personal ruin, moreover, 
comes not as sudden catastrophe, but as the result of 
causes, hidden it may be, but long at work. Human 
wrecks are not wrought in an hour. It was not a 
sudden and new-born impulse that prompted Lord 
Bacon to offer his smooth palm for the bribe that has 
blackened his name forever. The cinders and molten 
lava of the volcano are not born of a single day's 
burning. 

Guard, then, against the little beginnings of vice. 
Watch against the lodgment in your minds of those 
microbes of evil that so often float in the moral at- 
mosphere of the school and the college. Evil thoughts 
are sure in due time to breed evil deeds. Man also is 
social ; the social prompts to the convivial ; the con- 
vivial adds to its festivities the cup of exhilaration. 
The exhilaration may be a very little flame at the first, 
but lighted often it speedily blazes into an all-consum- 
ing fire. And so of all the sensual appetites : yielded 



MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 143 

to in youth they are sure to dominate in manhood ; 
once dominant their beastly hoofs are sure in time to 
trample all goodness and beauty into the mire. 

But it is not alone a collapse of character that is to 
be guarded against : a lesser but still a deplorable 
calamity, not unfrequently befalling educated men in 
our time, is a species of intellectual bankruptcy, — a 
bankruptcy in some, cases foreseen and foretold, as 
when one seeks to prepare himself for a profession 
by the shortest cut possible and simply to gain a live- 
lihood ; in other cases, a bankruptcy unexpected and 
utterly disappointing, as when one proposing to pre- 
pare himself for a profession resolves to enter on the 
practice of it only after the completest preparation 
that the highest industry can secure. As a student 
he outstrips his fellows, acquiring with rapidity and 
retaining with ease. His literary and scientific studies 
are finished with applause. His professional training 
is passed through with great credit and the functions 
of the chosen profession are assumed. To these func- 
tions is given an undivided attention. They absorb 
the whole man. The studies that engrossed him in 
the academy and roused him to enthusiasm in college 
have dropped out of mind. College books that were 
not sold when finished are thrown aside as lumber. 
The imago of the insect is not more removed from its 
larva state than this professional man from his school- 
days. The connection between the two periods is not 
that of continuous and consciously organic growth, 
but of an unconscious metamorphosis. The student 
has been lost in the lawyer, the doctor, the clergyman, 
the editor, the engineer. Here and there one rises to 
the full, rounded distinction of both scholar and pro- 
fessional man, a few attain to eminence as masters of 



144 MEN: MADE, SELF-MADE, AND UNMADE. 

the technicalities of their professions ; but a countless 
number sink into mere professional hacks, — prosti- 
tuting their professions into mere livelihood trades, — 
of whom the great public soon wearies and refuses to 
take account. The wealth of learning which they be- 
gan to accumulate with such fair promise, husbanded 
and added to, would have enriched life and increased 
their power ; but they are intellectual bankrupts. 

And yet even to these the training of the school- 
room and of the college has been invaluable. They 
gave a mental discipline and useful knowledge which 
could have been obtained in no other way. Even the 
professional hack is a better hack for having been 
well trained in intellect. Without due mental dis- 
cipline neither the principles involved in the profes- 
sions could have been properly understood, nor the 
functions required have been intelligently performed ; 
and without the drudgery of the schools the requisite 
mental discipline would have remained unattainable ; 
and among all the studies yet open to man none seem 
so completely capable of fulfilling at once the double 
office of discipline and of subsequent usefulness in 
life as those languages on which the existing litera- 
tures of the world more or less directly rest, and those 
sciences out of which are daily springing the discov- 
eries and inventions that are fast changing the face 
of the whole earth, and serving as vehicles of the 
thoughts that are to transform into neighbors and 
brothers all the races of mankind. 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

I 

My theme is the Ideal Scholar. In treating of it 
I propose to answer such questions as these : What is 
it to be a scholar in the broad acceptation of the term, 
especially in the times in which we live ? What are 
the characteristic features of the type of manhood 
which this ideal implies? What are the subjective 
conditions of success in the scholar's inward habits, 
his peculiar training, his self-command, his enthusi- 
asm, docility, and diligence ? What are the outward 
appliances and external circumstances that are equally 
essential, as the control of his time, exemption from 
sordid cares, from bodily ailments, and destructive 
habits ? Again, what spheres of interest or activity 
are essential to the conception of the scholar in these 
days of divided and subdivided labor, of minute ob- 
servation and limited attention, when a single sphere 
of erudition or a single science is deemed wide enough 
for the most aspiring and industrious? Shall any- 
thing like a broad and generous culture be hoped for 
or desired ? If so, in what shall it consist ? What 
are the studies and aims which it should propose ? and 
How far may this ideal be realized ? 

It might seem at first thought that the appellation 
of scholar has less significance at the present time 
than formerly, for the reason that the diffusion of in- 




146 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

telligence can no longer be specially limited to a few. 
All the world, it is said, now goes to school, conse- 
quently all the world are equally scholars. It is mere 
assumption for any one man to call himself a scholar 
by eminence on the ground of any special study, 
or any particular amount or quality of knowledge. 
There was a time when learning was the profession of 
the few, and was supposed to impart to its possessor a 
mysterious power over nature, or privilege with kings, 
or mastery over demons, or priestly favor with God. 
The scholar in the old time stood forth in the boldest 
relief from among the common herd, and bade them 
hear his voice and follow his call ; but nowadays all 
men are supposed to be equally instructed. Certainly 
all sit in critical judgment on their teachers and lend 
their ears, while the man who would presume to ad- 
dress or instruct them must beg a hearing with his 
hat in his hand. 

We accept these suggestions for all they are worth, 
while we insist that the devotion of the life to the ac- 
quisition of knowledge and the guidance and instruc- 
tion of others requires and forms men of a marked 
and peculiar type. This type is none the less signifi- 
cant and important in these days when knowledge is 
universal than it was when the teacher was a necro- 
mancer, the scribe was the pliant or treacherous ser- 
vant of his sovereign, and the priest was either a 
hypocrite or a bigot before God. We contend that 
the existence of a community of men, more or less 
educated themselves, supposes and demands another 
class of men whose culture is wider and more pro- 
found, both special and general, whose sharpened wit, 
ample generalizations, responsive sympathy, and pry- 
ing scrutiny are at hand to examine and to judge, to 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 147 

help and to hinder the aspirants after elementary- 
knowledge, and to diffuse truth of every sort among 
those who are capable of understanding their words. 
In other words, for the very reason that knowledge 
is more thorough, more varied and wddely diffused, it 
follows that we need and must produce a class of men 
who deserve to be called scholars by eminence, and 
who require a broad and thorough training. We con- 
tend for the old-fashioned significance of the product 
and the education which produces it. It does not fol- 
low that the w r ord college stands for the same idea 
when we speak of Harvard College or a business col- 
lege, or that a university has the same import with a 
high-school because in the German language it is often 
so called, or that a man becomes a scholar by pursu- 
ing a specialty for a few months even under the ablest 
teachers and side by side with those w T ho are scholars 
indeed. 

We assume ak the outset that it will take, time to 
make real an ideal like this. It is a long road on 
which a boy enters who is marked out for scholarship, 
especially in these days when to be a scholar must 
mean so much, and when to master a single branch of 
knowledge engrosses and exhausts a lifetime. While 
it is true that now and then an individual enters this 
career in late youth or in early manhood and makes 
a brilliant success, seeming with a stride to overtake 
and distance those w r ho have been years in the race, it 
is usually true that those who begin very early find in 
this a special advantage. This is not alone nor chiefly 
because they add years to their time as time, but be- 
cause the early years of life are golden in respect to 
the special activities which they require, and the pe- 
culiar acquisitions which they make possible. In child- 



148 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

hood, if it is normal, the memory of words and dates 
works as easily as breathing. Facts simply as facts 
write their records upon the passive brain as swiftly 
as they pass. Whatever we hear or see is recalled as 
spontaneously as it is gained. Under this law nature 
provides for the accumulation of those materials which 
will subsequently be needed, when time is cheap and 
labor ought to be play, and each day is a brief eter- 
nity of being, and each experience of life leaves its 
sharp-cut stamp upon the memory — furnishing the 
creative fantasy with exhaustless materials to work 
upon and manipulate when reason shall come to the 
front. 

If these early opportunities for special gains are 
not used, they can never be replaced. Memory and 
fancy are insensibly displaced by judgment and 
thought. The radiant dawn, with its varied and 
roseate hues, insensibly fades away before the steady 
light of the sober day. It is desirable to begin the 
scholar's life early for another reason. Even were it 
not true that certain activities and achievements can 
be better achieved in the early years, there would be 
reason enough in the fact that there is so much work 
to be done why we cannot begin too soon if we begin 
wisely. 

We also assume that success in the scholar's life 
depends on two conditions : the springs of action, as 
the feelings and purposes, on the one hand ; and the 
machinery and the materials of action, as the intellect- 
ual powers and achievements, on the other. Both of 
these are in part the gifts of nature : in respect to the 
strength of the one, and the reach and penetration of 
the other. The two act and react on one another in the 
entire course of the scholar's training. It is hard to 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR, 149 

say which is the more important from the beginning 
to the end ; but it is clear that both claim to be consid- 
ered as elements which give character to the product. 

With these premisings, our subject divides itself 
into the two leading heads of the teachers and the 
studies of the Ideal Scholar, using both in the largest 
and most liberal sense, and considering both as ad- 
dressing the springs of action as truly as they instruct 
the pure intellect. 

We begin with the scholar's teachers : the first and 
most important of which are those which are furnished 
by the home. We do not begin our life alone. We 
inherit from other generations a stock of impulses and 
powers which represent the past, and which pass into 
our life under the mysterious law which we name 
heredity. As we awake to conscious life we are sur- 
rounded by an atmosphere of influence and teachings 
which seem to give that set to our aims and that 
direction to our activities which become the nucleus 
of our individual life, and from which all the tissue of 
this subsequent life is developed into a separate per- 
sonality. Every Ideal Scholar should have a home 
to which he can trace more or fewer of those strong 
impulses which have made him to be what he is, and 
in which he has gained the definite convictions that 
are the deep foundations of his intellectual life. It 
now and then happens that some street Arab or home- 
less orphan stumbles upon a scholar's career and wins 
a scholar's renown. Whenever this occurs it is be- 
cause nature somehow supplies an exception which 
by its manifest import proves the rule to be true, — 
strangely furnishing some substitute for a father's 
wisdom or a mother's tenderness. Ordinarily, we say 
with confidence, the Ideal Scholar has a normal home, 



150 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

and finds in that home more or fewer of the control- 
ling impulses and guidance which enter into his sub- 
sequent life. The ideal scholar's home may not be a 
home of leisure or ease, or what is commonly called 
culture, but it must be pervaded by high aims, by a 
just estimate of knowledge as possessing an intrinsic 
dignity and worth when compared with shows and 
shams of any kind, and of the value of truth and 
honor as contrasted with trickery and finesse. The 
inmates of the home may none of them be technically 
educated in book knowledge. They may be neither 
profound in science nor versed in literature, and yet 
they may cherish profound convictions of the value of 
both as the condition of the highest manhood. To 
this is usually added the conviction that a well-cul- 
tured mind and an enlightened character are better 
securities for what is called success in life than any 
other advantages. It is from homes like these that 
scholars usually proceed, not necessarily poor in wealth, 
but, though poor, still rich in the possession of the 
highest aims, and sustained by the enthusiasm of 
moral self-respect and just ambitions. If they are 
also endowed with wealth and refined by art and ease, 
they are yet more ennobled by just conceptions of the 
worth of character and usefulness as the best ac- 
complishments which wealth can buy or culture can 
adorn. 

There is many a homely or dilapidated house in 
New England that is pointed out as the early home of 
one who was distinguished in his youth as the scholar 
of his hamlet or village, who subsequently won a no- 
ble name by some form of learned or active useful- 
ness of which a scholar's habits were the necessary 
foundation. If you ask what there was in that home 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 151 

which made him great, you will find that everything 
was there which was required for this end : the noble 
aims which were kindled in his mind by father or 
mother or other inmate, and the teachings or habits 
which were inculcated as essential to their realization. 
It was not that the parents were themselves scholars, 
or in any accepted sense persons of culture. Their 
books might have been few, their reading scanty, their 
acquaintance with men and science limited. Some 
books they had : always the Book of books, with the 
poetry and pathos, the eloquence and philosophy, 
which it is ever ready to impart to the responsive 
soul; and, in addition, Milton and Cowper, or, may- 
hap, Shakespeare in well-thumbed volumes, or Baxter, 
or Watts. In these volumes the fervent father or the 
imaginative mother found many striking thoughts and 
burning words concerning this life and the next, and 
the aims and inspiration that are befitting to both, 
which Gne or both had contrived to impart to the 
docile son, — waking once for all the glowing ideals 
which guided and warmed his subsequent life. 

If you require an example, read the story of Daniel 
Webster's youth, and as you visit his early home call 
to mind what thoughts were awakened in his mind 
under the shadows of the dark forest by the teachings 
of his father and mother, which he cherished with 
grateful reverence through all the years of his culmi- 
nating renown. Or think of the plain home of Theo- 
dore Parker in historic Lexington, or the home more 
refined of William Channing near the resounding 
beach of the twice historic Newport. Or ponder the 
story of Thomas Carlyle and of his lifelong idolatry 
of his father and mother, and the filial reverence which 
he cherished for both to the end of his life, plain and 



152 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

in a sense uncultured as they were. Eemember how 
there was nothing the latter valued so much in the 
midst of his London life as the oatmeal from the old 
home, — the walls of which were laid by his father's 
hands, — and this not so much for the oatmeal as for 
the inspiration of his mother, and the solid sense of 
the father, which it so distinctly revived. Read the 
lives of Emerson and Hawthorne, and you will find 
that the secret impulses of the life of both were found 
in the homes of each and were in each case marked 
and unique, in both cases unmistakable and strong. 
Recall to your minds the many splendid examples of 
scholarly achievement in which English and American 
history abound ; and you will find the same old story 
continually repeated, that whenever there have been 
notable achievements in the world of thought these 
may usually be traced to some inspiring incitement 
that has been kindled in the nursery or by the fire- 
side. 

From the home we pass to the school as the place 
where our Ideal Scholar encounters formal instruction 
and comes in contact with the professional teacher. 
We employ here no conventional terms, but include 
in the school every form of task-work which is as- 
signed to the scholar as a preparation for his active 
life, beginning with the first formal lessons which the 
family furnishes, and ending with the final thesis with 
which he justifies his title to teach a fellow-man in a 
public career. We include in the discipline of the 
school those easy lessons which are softened by a 
mother's indulgence, and the hard and dry tasks which 
are imposed by the merciless master. They are all 
alike — the daily recitations for which we are com- 
pelled to prepare, the fearful examinations from which 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 153 

there is no escape and no excuse, the pertinacious 
scrutiny which the impersonal examiner draws out 
into a lengthened torture — they are all alike in this, 
that they require the achievement of some task which 
ordinarily involves labor against a specified time of 
trial and test. Whatever this task may be, it is all 
the same in principle and aim, and that is, the enforce- 
ment of some mental activity for a definite achieve- 
ment, whether it is an effort of memory, of discrimi- 
nation, of reasoning, or some form of creative power. 

The school implies a teacher, and a teacher, it is 
presumed, knows more and can think better than his 
pupils, and should never release his pupil till he equals 
or surpasses himself. One office of the teacher is to 
assign some form of activity to his pupil, giving him 
all the aid that is consistent with this rule, — usually 
an activity which involves effort and often some duty 
which is to be done against a fixed time, for the sim- 
ple reason that it is by making such definite efforts 
that the pupil gains acquisition, alertness, discrimina- 
tion, self-control, and power. While it is true that 
school-tasks differ greatly in their rigor, it should ever 
be remembered, indeed it should be inscribed in let- 
ters of bronze over schools of every kind, "If you give 
up tasks you might as well dismiss the school" This 
is equally true whether the school is a kindergarten 
or a university. It is true, indeed, that the tasks 
prescribed in the kindergarten differ from those pre- 
scribed in the university ; but both are tasks, albeit the 
first are set to music, and the second are attended by 
no music except the moans of reluctant nature or of 
the exasperated will. We may allow to the scholar a 
choice between his tasks, so far as he knows his own 
powers or purposes, or has a right to consult them. 



154 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

We simply insist that when they are set or assumed 
they must be enforced, and that the logic which justi- 
fies the teacher in constraining the pupil to achieve 
any task may also justify him in assigning and enforc- 
ing a fixed curriculum as the basis and condition of 
what men call scholarship. Of what this should in- 
clude we will speak later. At present we affirm the 
right and duty in general, which, indeed, no man will 
deny. 

And yet so much is said in these days against the 
principle of constraint and compulsion in both school 
and university life, so much is urged in favor of free- 
dom and choice that I may be excused for dwelling 
for a moment on what seems to me the essence and 
ideal of life at school. Let us, then, for a moment 
shake ourselves clear of all associations with the rod 
or the dungeon, and form to ourselves the most roseate 
images of the means of enforcement. Then let us 
ask and seek to answer the question, Why should the 
schoolma'am or the college professor assume to pre- 
scribe and enforce our lessons at all ? Why not leave 
both the selection and the acquisition to the fancy or 
the choice of the pupil ? Simply, we reply, because 
the world of life for which the school professes to 
prepare abounds in tasks, and unless the school an- 
ticipates this discipline the best preparation for life 
cannot be achieved. Day by day the physician, the 
lawyer, the clergyman, and the man of business, nay, 
even the teacher himself, meets and is confronted by 
his daily lessons. Even the gentleman who sets his 
own tasks can only pass the time which he desires to 
kill by making engagements, even if he does not ful- 
fil them ; and even he, should he go too far in remiss- 
ness, will be visited with summary disgrace. It is 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 155 

true we are not marked for our failures in life after 
the fashion of the school ; but the marks are deeper 
and more lasting, and often incapable of erasure. If 
we lift our thoughts above the sense-world, are we not 
taught by nature and conscience that life itself is a 
series of duties assigned to each of us under the 
" Great Taskmaster's eye " ? 

I find the same conception of the relation of school 
discipline to the activities of life expressed by the 
brother of the founder of this school in the funda- 
mental constitution of the sister academy, when he 
describes its object to be " to teach the great end and 
business of living," showing in this that he not only 
had a clear insight into the end of schooling of every 
sort, but also discerned that the most important thing 
which we learn at school is not Greek or Latin, or 
algebra or geometry, but how to meet the duties of 
life promptly, thoroughly, and satisfactorily, — life, in 
his view, being a series of tasks which, if we face them 
resolutely and faithfully, will at last become our play. 
We may say what we will about compulsory study, 
and compulsory attendance, and compulsory prepara- 
tion. We may succeed in driving tasks out of our 
schools and colleges ; but we cannot succeed in driving 
them out of life. It were a pity to choose to forego 
them in the days of youth ; for it will be all the more 
difficult to meet them later. 

The teacher, one or many, does not make the school, 
nor do his lessons or his example furnish the scholar's 
entire ideal. Sometimes, indeed, by the breadth of 
his acquisitions and the force of his character, he is 
both ideal and inspiration to all whom he instructs, so 
that they bless him while he lives, and honor his name 
when he is dead. But even then he does not exhaust 



156 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

or hinder the inspirations which came from another 
source. You send your son to the schoolmaster, says 
Emerson, but it is his schoolfellow who teaches him. 
Much as this seems to signify, its meaning and truth 
grow upon us the more we think of its breadth of 
import. It is at the school that the pupil makes his 
first personal and definite acquaintance with the great 
world without the household. Before school-time be- 
gins, the world within those limits had been moulded 
so gradually with his growing consciousness as to seem 
a part of himself and almost to blend with the earth 
and sky. But so soon as the boy enters the school 
and definitely faces his kind, say a dozen or more, 
with looks of wonder, or sympathy, or defiance, there 
gradually dawns upon his awakened mind the knowl- 
edge of what public sentiment may signify, with its 
smiles and its frowns ; of the laws which it imposes, 
with its doctrines of rights, its claims of property ; and 
all the manifold experiences in miniature which social 
manhood is forced to make for itself, and out of which 
emerge the boy's first conceptions of law and govern- 
ment, of his duties and his rights. Gradually the 
world of one's school-fellows becomes the most impor- 
tant world, often the only human world that the grow- 
ing boy cares for in his years of " storm and stress." 
Between the class-room and the playground it is the 
only world with which he has much to do or greatly 
cares for, whether he dreams or is awake. For within 
its limits he finds ample material for his loves and 
hates, his plans and achievements, and upon its varied 
occupations he lavishes all the resources of his never- 
exhausted youth. Within this luxuriant field of the 
fermenting common life of every school and college 
there spring up and grow together the golden wheat 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 157 

and the poisonous weed, noble resolves and hateful 
passions, generous aims and vile conspiracies, common 
movements which kindle and fan the flames of a noble 
enthusiasm, or single-handed heroism which defies a 
maddened crowd. If the social tide sets strongly in 
the right direction, the voice of the community is the 
voice of God ; if it moves strongly toward evil, its 
temporary triumphs only prepare the way for a disas- 
trous and conspicuous defeat. 

The educating force of these influences with our 
Ideal Scholar is sufficiently obvious. It is not alone 
the teacher, nor the text-books, nor the manifold other 
appliances which make or mar the best development, 
but most of all it is the common social life with which 
the scholar is surrounded that silently shapes and 
energizes his inner being. Within this charmed circle 
those school and college friendships are formed which 
so often become friendships for life. It usually hap- 
pens — it always happens if the spirit is of finer mould 
— that some single companion is sooner or later found 
who becomes the other self. With common tasks and 
common aims, each finds in the other the complement 
of himself, as each reflects the other's tastes or sup- 
plies his defects. One school or college friend, or 
perhaps a little group of zealous scholars, animated 
by common purposes or ardently following common 
studies, have sometimes done more for one another's 
scholarly achievements than an army of learned pro- 
fessors, or the costliest outfit of books or apparatus. 
Not that the latter may not for many purposes be in- 
dispensable, but that the former are always fraught 
with elemental fire. 

The great schools of England and her greater uni- 
versities have done immensely more for the scholar- 



158 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

ship of England, or, rather, for the scholars of Eng- 
land, by the intense and pervasive common life which 
they have sustained, than by every other provision for 
culture and inspiration. If you do not believe this, 
read with intelligence the scores, or, as I should say, 
the hundreds of the striking biographies which we 
have of England's great men who had a university 
training. Two school-friends whose hearts early beat 
in unison, a half -score of inmates of the same college 
at Oxford or Cambridge, a group of like-minded fel- 
lows in the common room have not only kindled in 
their own souls a zeal for learning, but have carried 
its lighted torch half round the globe in a glowing 
track. Much as these social bonds are needed in Eng- 
land among those who call themselves scholars, in this 
country they are needed more. It is for this reason 
that we deprecate any weakening of the personal ele- 
ment in teachers and the tendency to substitute lec- 
tures and written examinations for the lively question 
and answer in which man meets man with open face 
and loosened tongue. For this reason we mourn over 
the tendency to abandon or disintegrate the old college 
class, with those sympathies and antipathies through 
the quadrennial course which gave the student such 
opportunities in experience with one another as are 
impossible in almost any other conceivable situation 
in life. If the new fashion shall prevail, it will come 
to pass that within what was once a royal dining-hall 
arranged for a common repast, we shall be summoned 
to take our intellectual nutriment a la carte in little 
and changing squads, and consequently know little 
and care less for the few with whom we chance to 
associate for a month. 

With thoughts of the common life and its impor- 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 159 

tance to the scholar, there come in the subjects of 
common sports at school or college and their influence 
upon the scholar's ideal, aye, and upon his achieve- 
ments, as also upon his manners, his tastes, and his 
character. This subject is likely to be more, rather 
than less, important for the time to come. Athletics 
in all their forms are everywhere an established in- 
terest. Contests of every kind between individuals, 
and classes, and schools, and colleges occur as regu- 
larly as the recitations, and are often more numer- 
ously attended, especially when the latter are optional. 
In respect to this subject the following questions natu- 
rally suggest themselves : What place should athletics 
hold in our ideal of the training of the scholar? 
Should they be systematically taught and the practice 
of them be universally enforced? Should contests in 
strength and skill be permitted under prudent direc- 
tion ? Should such contests be allowed between the 
representatives of different institutions ? 

To these questions only the briefest answers can be 
given, with reasons as brief. To the first of these 
questions the answer is easy. Athletics and hygiene 
should be taught in every school. The theory of each 
is supposed to enter into the ideal knowledge which is 
presumed of every scholar. The obvious conditions of 
health and corporal well-being ought to be familiar to 
every educated boy and girl. The practice of both 
ought to be enforced during the earlier years of the 
scholar's life, because these are the plastic and glow- 
ing years, and the muscular and organic life is then 
receptive of every physical habit on which vigor de- 
pends, or through which weakness and disease may 
sap or destroy the energies of life. They should be 
encouraged later, but enforced no longer than the 



160 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

tastes and preferences accept with pleasure the as- 
signed activities of the drill-room, for the reason that 
by many the gymnastics of the independent walk, the 
adventurous climb, the solitary row, and the unnamed 
delights of the summer and even of the winter land- 
scape are greatly preferred. 

The subject of trials of athletic skill and strength, 
especially between different schools, presents especial 
difficulties. We cannot do justice to such a subject 
here. At first the spectacle is not unattractive, — of 
friendly, yet earnest, strifes of strength and skill, with 
all the restraints upon hostile passions which experi- 
ence teaches, and which the generous impulses of 
strenuous youth are ready to accept. And yet, on the 
other hand, the elaborate arrangements for the season, 
the recurring excitements attendant upon each re- 
ported contest, the thought, and feeling, and time, and 
money which are expended upon the betting, and the 
jealousies and envyings which are incident to the 
theory and practice of these contests, must give us 
pause before we pronounce them an unmitigated bless- 
ing. But yet, even on this unfavorable side, we find 
some good, as in the restraint of the grosser indul- 
gences of appetite and passion, in the enforcement of 
gentlemanly ways, in the conduct of programmes and 
treaties, and now and then in the noble behavior of 
the field. Some of our best athletes become the best 
lawyers and clergymen and physicians. Some of them 
take the high honors, and, among their high ambitions 
to excel, do not forget the highest of all. For these 
reasons, to say the least, we cannot exclude athletic 
excellence or ambition from the scholar's ideal. 

Thus far we have spoken of the teaching and train- 
ing of the home and of the school in which the agency 



TEE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 161 

of parents and teachers and schoolmates is conspicu- 
ous. We have omitted the most important of all, 
namely, the teaching and training which each man be- 
stoivs upon himself. We may not forget that for the 
Ideal Scholar this is the most efficient training which 
any man can possibly receive, and that without this 
all other teaching and discipline must fail of their best 
effect. Parents and the home circle may inculcate 
and inspire ; teachers may assign the most judicious 
tasks and enforce them most wisely ; schoolmates may 
be troops of angels that would bear the pupil up to 
God on steps of duty and wings of faith : and yet, if 
the scholar does not become his own efficient and 
inspiring teacher, the ideal conditions of a scholar's 
career are not fulfilled, and the genuine scholar is not 
produced. Hence we say emphatically, every scholar 
is his own best teacher, and sooner or later he must 
assume and discharge this function for himself. The 
most efficient schooling to which he can possibly be 
subjected is that to which he subjects himself. There 
comes to every schoolboy who makes of himself a man, 
early or later, on a sudden or more gradually, the dis- 
covery that, for what he is to become, he is chiefly 
responsible to himself. It is of little consequence how 
he reaches this conviction : whether it breaks upon him 
with startling abruptness, as in a vision, or whether it 
is gradually reached, as the darkness of midnight is 
replaced by the dawn. Its voice is distinct and clear : 
Henceforth you must be your own teacher and master 
combined. To this voice the response is equally clear 
and strong, I must and I will. Sooner or later the 
questions follow : What, then, will you become ? and 
How? If the answer concerns intellectual achieve- 
ment, according to its breadth and fulness, such will 



162 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR 

be the man, provided only that industry and self- 
control hold him to his work. To such a pupil no 
master can possibly be so rigorous as he becomes to 
himself. Every oversight in his daily lesson is noticed 
by himself with greater rigor than by the sternest of 
teachers. Whatever labor and attention can accom- 
plish is freely lavished upon his work, and sooner or 
later his work shows the result in his quickened intel- 
lect, his enlarged acquisitions, his exacter knowledge, 
and the completed mastery of his powers, to whatever 
service they are applied. With this increased self- 
reliance there is increased self-distrust. With aug- 
mented energy of purpose there is a deepened convic- 
tion that he needs help and guidance from others, that 
his own fancies and convictions require the correction 
of other men's judgment, and the light of other men's 
knowledge. This is the natural result of that deep- 
ened simplicity of purpose which comes from a deep- 
ened sense of responsibility to one's self. Hence it is 
no paradox to say that self-distrust may be increased 
in proportion to one's self-reliance ; that the most thor- 
ough scholar, who is the most thorough because he is 
the most self-reliant, is also the most candid and lib- 
eral in his judgments of others and the most sus- 
picious of himself. The ranks of the noblest scholars 
are crowded with men of this type, — men of the 
rarest candor, coupled with the strongest convictions ; 
men with a martyr's meekness, yet ready for the mar- 
tyr's fire ; men as unlike as possible to the intellectual 
bullies with whom they are sometimes confounded. 

When the scholar is fully awake to his obligations 
to himself and is competent to judge of the studies 
which will best meet his future wants, he is competent 
to select his studies for himself, and he is not before : 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 163 

certainly not without the strenuous advice of older 
men. How soon this state may be attained by this 
or that individual we need not decide. Now and then 
there is a scholar who shows in his youth tastes so de- 
cided and capacities so strong as to leave no room for 
any question except the one-sided inquiry whether his 
one-sidedness does not need to be corrected by the 
very studies which he does not fancy. But, conceding 
that such a case is exceptional, we are forced to con- 
clude that self-control cannot safely be allowed until 
some serious sense of self - responsibility has been 
evoked, and with it the necessity that the liberty of 
choice will not be abused, but will be intelligently and 
earnestly used. 

But we pass a second time over the embers of this 
burning question with hasty tread. 

Thus far have we been occupied with the teachers 
of the Ideal Scholar under the designation of the 
home, the school, and himself. We have conceived 
the school to include the college and university as the 
necessary conditions of his training. In other words, 
we have assumed that his training is to be a public 
education, that is, an education prosecuted under the 
stimulus of an active social life. For the reasons 
which have been already suggested, we have not con- 
trasted a public with a private education, for the 
simple reason that the last is possible for only a very 
few, and that for these few it should be supplemented 
by the collisions and enticements of the school, and 
the stimulants and exhilarants of the university. These 
last should never be dispensed with ; and, even in the 
case of princes or the exceptionally wealthy, more or 
less of the school-life is recognized as the essential 
completion of an education which will fit them to deal 
with their fellow-men. 



164 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

Leaving the teachers, let us pass to their teaching, 
— in other words, to the studies which are essential 
to the scholar's ideal. We naturally begin with lan- 
guage, inasmuch as all education, even that of nature, 
begins with the mastery over words and speech. There 
are not a few in these days who forget this truth, or, 
recognizing it as a fact, are disposed to rebel against 
the lessons which it suggests, or to reverse the posi- 
tion in which words have stood in respect to facts. 
Their lusty cry is, Give us things ; confront us with 
facts. Nature meets us at every turn with living 
realities. Words are of use only as they acquaint us 
with nature, so far, and so far only as they teach us 
to observe, or as they record what others have seen or 
proved, or what we may discern and test for ourselves. 
To be sure, words are a great convenience. They give 
a man a thousand eyes in place of two. They dispense 
with his travelling over unmeasured distances, and 
his mining in dark and gloomy depths, or flying along 
trackless spaces. But all these other services were 
better dispensed with under the pressing calls of na- 
ture, as she bids us confer with herself directly and 
alone. 

As against all these plausible and urgent reasons, 
we urge the incontestible truth, explain it or not as 
we may, that, in point of fact and under the guidance 
and impulse of nature herself, the intellectual culture 
of man begins with the mastery of his mother-tongue, 
and this not as a means as to what lies beyond, but 
through the processes themselves by which this mas- 
tery is achieved : in learning to speak with the articu- 
lating organs and to interpret by the eye the symbols 
of uttered speech. How or why it should be we may 
not explain. That the combined activities of the 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 165 

mental and vocal elements of the unseen thought and 
the seen or uttered word should be of such enormous 
force in the discipline and development of the human 
intelligence, we know to be a fact. Let two children 
begin with equal promise. Let speech and the physi- 
cal capacity for spoken language be denied to the one, 
or simply disused, and let the other be trained to 
speak and read, and the disparity in the intellectual 
development of the two will speedily be enormous. 
Nothing will remove this disparity except the study of 
language, which the loosened tongue or the interpret- 
ing eye make possible. Let these be given, and the 
powers expand under the varied and quickening stim- 
ulants which come through language alone. 

To a certain extent and for a certain length of time 
the study of language is indispensable as the medium 
of culture of every kind, in whatever form culture may 
be desired, simply, if for no other reason, because it 
confronts the man with the countless relations of 
things and of thought which would be unobserved or 
forgotten were they not fixed by words and thus made 
the peculiar and permanent possession of the mind. It 
is idle to spend the time in proving what no man 
denies, that the mastery of one language at least is 
essential to awaken, to instruct, and to inform the in- 
fant mind. Even the extremest physicist, who would 
fain confine his faith to the hardest kind of mate- 
rial facts, would neither dodge nor forget the truth 
that it is not facts, but the relations of facts, which 
make science, and that these relations must be sym- 
bolized in words. Even he will concede that the edu- 
cation of the student of nature must begin with the 
mastery of the mother-tongue. 

Again, the mastery of language is not only neces- 



166 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR, 

sary if we would acquire, but equally that we may be 
able to communicate to others. To impart with clear- 
ness and facility and method and interest, the teacher 
must be the master of his instrument ; and to be the 
master of an instrument so subtle as language re- 
quires art and skill, and art and skill carry us back 
to science. But here it may be asked, Why, for all 
these purposes, does not the study of English suffice, 
and why is it not wiser to master the capacities of a 
single instrument rather than divide your energies 
between two or three ? Why study any other than 
English, except for the reason that French and Ger- 
man can tell you facts that the English does not dis- 
close ? Or, if you study a language for the sake of 
the language, to gain some peculiar discipline, why 
not study English in a philological and critical way : 
as Old English and Middle English, or Modern Eng- 
lish, and let all the others go except as reporters of 
facts and instruments of information ? Especially, 
why insist on the Greek in these days of expanding 
science and multiplied letters, when the English liter- 
ature spreads out its riches, at once the labor and the 
luxury of a lifetime, in their boundless profusion? 
The challenge is fair. The answer to it is ready. 

First of all, experience has decided that a language 
other than your own can be used to greater advantage 
for all those purposes for which you study language at 
all. In other words, you learn to study English criti- 
cally to better advantage when you see it reflected in 
German or Greek than by looking at it directly in the 
face and comparing it by standards taken from itself 
alone. As you judge a familiar landscape to greater 
advantage in respect to form or color or other features 
when you see it reflected in a mirror, so is it with a 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 167 

scholar's facilities for estimating his mother-tongue. 
The child and the man who have had no special train- 
ing find it almost as difficult to criticise their mother- 
tongue as to criticise the mother whom they unreflect- 
ingly love and admire. But so soon as they have 
been schooled to do this with another language than 
their own, they come back to their own with new eyes 
and new standards. No a priori reasoning or dog- 
matic assertions can set aside facts like these. Every 
scholar who deserves the name must accept them as 
axiomatic truths. To assert that it cannot be so and 
shall not be so for the next generation, because we 
cannot see why it should be so, is to fight against the 
wind. 

But if you must employ another language, why not 
use German in place of Greek? What gives to Greek 
this unchallenged preeminence among the thousand 
tongues that have been used by man ? Is not the 
German as articulated in its paradigms, as refined in 
its structure, as profound in thought as is the Greek ? 
Is not Goethe a better model for the modern scholar 
than even Plato, or Homer, or Sophocles ? When I 
am posed with these questions I have one answer. 
The Greeks possessed one quality in language and dic- 
tion, in sentiment and reasoning, and that is the gift 
of perpetual, exuberant youth. The freshness of life's 
morning was always with them. In their poetry, their 
oratory, their philosophy, and their drama, clearness, 
directness, pathos, earnestness, frankness, and consum- 
mate beauty are always dominant. This youth enabled 
them to produce a literature which should hold the 
exalted function of training the scholars of humanity 
for all the generations. This function they will con- 
tinue to exercise in spite of the confident predictions 



168 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

to the contrary. The strong convictions of those who 
have made trial of this training remain unshaken. 
We may not forget that the host of these witnesses is 
enormous, extending through many generations. The 
position of Greece as the teacher of Rome and the 
schoolmaster of civilized Christendom was not an acci- 
dent, but was founded on the conviction that comes 
from trial. No man who has thoroughly availed him- 
self of this culture, and in any proper sense put it to 
the proof, has regretted the time or the labor which it 
has involved. Every man who has gone far enough 
in his Greek to read Plato, and Homer, and Demos- 
thenes with moderate facility, will testify that by his 
mastery of Greek he has gained more than he has lost 
in time, in the facility for his other linguistic studies, 
provided the normal period for a scholar's curriculum 
were allowed him. We premised early in our argu- 
ment that a scholar's training requires some ampli- 
tude of time. It were idle to forget that time is 
essential to success in every enterprise. We do not 
contend that the mastery of two languages does not 
require more time than the mastery of one, and yet 
we do contend, in all sobriety, that if one be modern 
and the other be classical, that the one will so aid the 
other that the mastery of both shall not require double 
the time demanded for one alone. 

That the Ideal Scholar of the present day should 
be the easy master of more or fewer of the modern 
languages may be assumed without discussion or argu- 
ment. At what time the study of the latter shall be- 
gin must depend upon circumstances which are beyond 
the control of many scholars. That it is desirable that 
this study should begin very early in life is obvious to 
every competent judge. That much valuable time is 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 169 

likely to be wasted if it is not thus used is equally 
clear. During these early years time seems so abun- 
dant as to be inexhaustible, and hence it is often lav- 
ishly thrown away. When the memory moves with 
spontaneous ease and holds fast its gains without 
effort, then is the time to connect the acquisition of 
one or two modern languages with exercises in the 
mother-tongue. If such studies are conjoined with 
moderate energy and skill, the light which is reflected 
from the one to the other will stimulate curiosity and 
incite to thought. As upon the naive study of the 
mother and foreign tongue there is superinduced that 
reflective study of both which we call grammar, the 
one enlivens the other, and grammar itself is lifted 
above the " Serbonian bog " of abstract metaphysics 
into which whole armies of jubilant youth have been 
sunk. Or at least the stepping-stones of this morass 
will have been made more obvious by the play and 
counter-play of their mutually reflected lights. When 
a boy thus favored enters upon the school, he will have 
made enormous gains if he rightly uses these advan- 
tages. Alas ! it too often happens that the boy thus 
distinguished is sated with his intellectual gains. He 
finds his school-work so easy that the habit of severe 
and dogged effort is never acquired, or, at least, not 
matured. The reflective and discriminating period of 
his school-life is wasted or dawdled away for want of 
knowledge or of noble ambition. When he is intro- 
duced to the severer drills of classical lessons, his 
previous training has given him facility enough to 
render him independent of the hardest work. His 
facile memory or disciplined wit serves as substitutes 
for reflective thought. The foundation was of the 
best, but the superstructure became frail and flimsy. 



170 TEE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

This comes of that simple unfaithfulness to which 
there are many splendid exceptions. 

It depends largely on the highest schools of learn- 
ing to decide whether a high ambition for thorough 
work and classical learning shall animate the schools 
below, and whether or not the boys who are peculiarly 
favored with opportunities for early culture, especially 
in the languages, shall gain that classical facility 
which is easily within their reach, and submit to that 
grammatical exactness and copious reading which are 
the surest foundations for a correct and facile English 
style. Should the universities cease to require some 
decent mastery of Greek and Latin as a condition 
of their highest honors ; should they, by example or 
dogma, fail to stimulate and impart those higher at- 
tainments in both these languages which modern facil- 
ities make possible, — the danger would not be slight 
that many of those youths who enjoy special facilities 
in childhood for linguistic studies will choose what 
they will fancy is an easier path to scholastic honors. 
If, on the other hand, the sentiment expressed by the 
university teaching and action should set strongly and 
positively in the opposite direction, we have every rea- 
son to believe that the spirit which is in the heart of 
our most cultivated youth will make itself manifest in 
splendid fruits of classical and literary enthusiasm. 

These questions concerning the study of language 
suggest another topic, namely, the study of literature, 
particularly the familiar acquaintance with English 
literature, as essential to the Ideal Scholar. Whatever 
opinions may be held with respect to the relative 
claims of the classical and modern languages, all men 
agree in holding that the cultivated scholar, and in 
these days the cultivated gentleman, should be famil- 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 171 

iar with the priceless treasures of English literature 
and find in them a constant stimulant and delight. 
The Ideal Scholar is no dry philologue who is preoc- 
cupied with forms and facts, with dates and names, 
but a thinking and feeling man, whose refined imag- 
ination is easily borne upwards upon the pinions of 
eloquence and song, and whose cultivated taste has 
been disciplined by the perfection of diction in prose 
or verse. If our critical learning fails to stimulate 
and train the imagination to this sensitive and enlight- 
ened sympathy with literature, it may fail of its most 
important service. 

Culture in this direction is not in the strictest sense 
of the term scholastic in the conditions of its growth. 
Much has been expected of late from scholastic tasks 
and exercises in creating and directing a taste for 
English literature. With this view, careful studies in 
Anglo-Saxon and Early English have been introduced 
into our higher schools. After the same theory, spe- 
cial critical studies of our great English writers have 
been prepared for the same class of scholars. Some 
good results have been achieved, but much less than 
has been expected. The explanation of the failure 
of efforts like these has already been hinted at in the 
general truth, that we study our native language and 
literature most effectually, other things being equal, 
when we see them as reflected in the mirror of an- 
other tongue. 

But while we contend for this truth, we as earnestly 
contend that the Ideal Scholar cannot begin too early 
to be familiar with the best English writers, and that 
what he reads and the manner in which he reads are 
of the utmost consequence to his culture and his suc- 
cess in life. The taste for reading, in the special 



172 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

sense of the phrase, is variable as to the time and 
character of its development. To some it comes in 
early childhood, needing to be carefully directed and 
often to be rigorously repressed. To others it comes 
discouragingly late, even when the intellect is strong 
and bright. It supposes some positive individual ac- 
tivity of thought or feeling on the part of the young 
reader, something nobler than the mechanical response 
of the passive imagination, some active recognition of 
a likeness between the pictures or thoughts of the 
books which we read, and the memories and reflec- 
tions of the reader. Such a revelation comes when a 
boy reads passively in a poem or a novel, and all at 
once there seems to start out from the printed page 
some past experience of his own, some familiar land- 
scape, some character such as he has met before, some 
living picture of the past, some serious thought or 
earnest aspiration. When a boy finds reality like this 
in a book, then he begins to read. If to read is to 
connect our actual experience with what our books 
impart, it would seem to be most desirable to connect 
the reading of the scholar with his severer studies, so 
far at least as such reading may bring the matter of 
his studies home to his individual thinking. Inas- 
much as history should be taught early in life when 
the memory is fresh and keen, it follows that the ro- 
mance of history and biography should be stimulated 
to their utmost by the skilful use of the manifold 
appliances which are now so ready at hand. Here is 
the field for the inventive and stimulative power of 
the teacher. 

That his task is not easy is most obvious. It is 
equally clear that something needs to be done to bring 
back to our young scholars more vigorous and self- 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 173 

relying and self-respecting habits of reading, in place 
of the mechanical dawdling and superficial ways which 
are the result of our modern book-making and news- 
papers. Would that we could draw off into the sewer 
the torrent of frothy and sometimes nasty stuff that 
persistently tempts the youth of our schools and col- 
leges, and could replace it with a tonic and refreshing 
stream ! The least that we can say is, that no youth 
has begun to educate himself who has not taken his 
reading into his own hands in order to select the mat- 
ter and direct the measure of its use. Look out for 
your reading, is the first cautionary and directive sig- 
nal which the young scholar should set up who begins 
the work of self -culture. You may find in your read- 
ing your inspiration and solace. You have need of 
care that it does not become your poison and torment. 

The thought may long ago have occurred to some of 
my hearers that the Ideal Scholar which the speaker 
has in mind is the ideal scholar of other times when 
the physical universe was veiled to the eyes of culti- 
vated men, and when nature was withholding those 
wondrous revelations which in such swift succession 
have since been unveiled to man's wondering eyes, — 
which have been subjected to the most trying tests 
and successfully applied to the arts and conveniences 
of life. Surely, it is not only natural, but necessary, 
to inquire what place this newly discovered Cosmos 
may claim in the studies of cultivated man, and what 
changes should follow in our system of culture and 
education. 

To this question I reply, Nature, as now interpreted 
and understood, cannot and should not be excluded 
from the scholar's attention. The facts, the laws, the 
theories, the experiments, with the changed concep- 



174 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

tions of matter and spirit which they warrant, the 
new views of the near and distant universe, the dis- 
coveries and arts which the microscope, the telescope, 
and the spectroscope have made possible, the altered 
conceptions of matter, living and dead, and of spirit 
in its relation to both, — all these should be familiar 
to the man who aspires to the culture of the scholar. 
Neither man nor his institutions, neither literature nor 
history, can be understood unless the cultured mind 
recognizes what science has established as true, and 
what science threatens to destroy. Tennyson's " In 
Memoriam," with its depressing questionings and its 
triumphant faith, shows most emphatically that even 
modern poetry is modified by scientific thought. Every 
newspaper and review, every history and tale is pene- 
trated by the all-dissolving or the all-assuring atmos- 
phere of what calls itself modern science. We cannot 
leave science out of our theory of education if we 
would, we would not if we could. What changes 
does this changed condition of things require in our 
theory of education ? 

The first thought which occurs in answer to this 
question is, that it invests the mathematical studies 
with a new importance, whether they are viewed from 
the standpoint of practice or of theory. Indeed, all 
men concede that without a mastery over the pure and 
applied mathematics a mastery over modern science 
is impossible. What grammar is to linguistics and 
philology, the mathematics are to scientific studies. 
They are at once the trainers and the material of sci- 
entific thought. As trainers of the mind, they keep 
ward and watch at the vestibule of physical science. 
The inscription, " Let no man enter herein unless he 
can geometrize" has a new significance in these mod- 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 175 

ern times. Geometry and algebra are both grammar 
and logic to the sciences of nature, as they train to 
the capacity of discerning the nicest distinctions in the 
field of thought, and as they enable us to follow them 
often tremulously along Mahomet's bridge of a single 
hair. In a sense that is loftier and more daring ; they 
both conceal and reveal the mysteries of the kingdom 
of nature and enable us to interpret the very thoughts 
of God. 

Next, scientific studies should be combined with 
those called literary. It is unnatural to divorce the 
two, for the reason that they are equally natural and 
necessary to the thinking mind. An ideal education, 
so far as it proposes and effects a thorough or bal- 
anced culture, requires that both should be pursued, 
so far at least as to attain mastery of the principles 
fundamental to both. The two have always in fact 
been combined ever since the days of Descartes and 
Newton when modern physics began to be. To con- 
tend that the one is practical and the other scholastic 
is to overlook the truly scientific in each and what 
gives the common interest to both. To overlook and 
to neglect the severer side of physics is to be faithless 
to science. To attempt to turn schools of science into 
mere workshops or distilleries is to begin at the wrong 
end of a lane, and soon to find yourself thrown out of 
your path and in the region of nowhere. In other 
words, to divide schools of education too early into the 
so-called practical on the one hand and the scholastic 
on the other is to overlook the very essence of science. 

On the other hand, physics as a science should not 
be taught too early, no more should the metaphysics 
of grammar or criticism, and for the common reason 
that the observing and retaining functions are devel- 



176 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

oped before the reflective. For this reason familiarity 
with the phenomena of nature, as these address the 
observant powers and appeal to the feelings and stim- 
ulate the imagination, cannot be begun too soon or be 
too sedulously cultivated. Natural history in all its 
attractive branches can hardly be taught too early. 
If I may speak from a personal experience, I shall 
never cease to be profoundly grateful to one of my 
teachers who persuaded me to study botany with him 
as an extra, at the age of thirteen, when the adven- 
turous period which comes to every boy was beckon- 
ing me to every excitement of country life. The study 
had been wholly unknown, and, with its hard termi- 
nology and its careful analysis, it seemed at first any- 
thing but attractive ; but I had not pursued it a month 
before nature became invested with unsuspected mys- 
teries, revealing to me a new life. It taught me to 
walk adventurously miles and miles through brush 
and brier, over rocks and in swamps, fearless of snakes 
and vermin, to greet the early sunrise and the late 
sunsets of long summer days, in long tramps before 
and after school-hours, till I had explored every rod 
as it would seem, within miles of my country home. 
And what was my reward? It gave me eyes and 
ears, not only during my eager youth, but for all my 
subsequent life. It gave an interest to my rambles in 
open nature, which I have not lost till this day. I 
never see one of the formerly well-known flowers, 
whether common or rare, that I do not greet the first 
as a well-known friend, and the second as a friend 
long parted and now restored. These experiments 
were made long ago, long before the modern games 
of base-ball and lawn-tennis, which at present assert 
such exclusive possession of the youthful mind. We 



THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 177 

had base-ball in some sort then ; but I am apt to think 
that if I had not been so fortunate in my botanical 
experience my life would have been the poorer. 

My experience with physics was not dissimilar. 
Upon this I stumbled almost by accident. It was 
taught to the girls of the school in a simple fashion, 
and also to those of the boys who were not destined 
to college life. I happened to take it up for evening 
reading, and even now I can well remember how my 
mind exulted in its first acquaintance with the mys- 
teries of force and law as illustrated by the simplest 
experiments, each one of which was a new surprise. 
I might speak of a similar accidental experience with 
American history. I merely wish to enforce the opin- 
ion that in an ideal education science and letters 
should be conjoined, and that, whether the period of 
learning is longer or shorter, both elements should be 
combined. The proportion between the elements may 
be diverse, the languages studied may not be the same, 
or if they are the same the methods of study may 
vary in some slight degree, while still it remains true 
that no man is truly educated who at some time and 
in some measure does not cultivate his mind by the 
reflective study of language and the reflective study 
of nature. The claims of science can never, however, 
be so engrossing: as to set aside the demand for that 
culture which comes from letters and what letters im- 
ply. The one study should never be made an offset 
against the other. On the other hand, no thinking or 
cultured man can fail to be moved by the wondrous 
revelations concerning the material and spiritual uni- 
verse which modern science has given to man during 
the present century. 

We should never forget that the Ideal Scholar is 



178 THE IDEAL SCHOLAR. 

responsive to Truth in all her aspects and revelations. 
As he gazes upon the face of nature with an eye in- 
structed by science and refined by culture, it is bright- 
ened with the attractions of Beauty, and as he looks 
more and more intently there will be awakened the 
joy and adoration of Faith. 



BIOGRAPHY. 

I have been anxious to choose a subject for my 
lecture which should have to do both with literature 
and with life. I have pictured to myself what now I 
see before me, an assemblage of young men to whom 
the two worlds — the world of books and the world of 
men — were freshly and delightfully opening. Let 
me take some subject for my evening's talk, I said to 
myself, which shall bring those two great worlds to- 
gether; and so I have come to speak to you about 
Biography. 

Biography is, in its very name, the literature of life. 
It is especially the literature of the individual human 
life. All true literature is the expression of life of 
some sort. Books are the pictures into which life 
passes as the landscape passes through the artist's 
brain into the glowing canvas, gaining thereby that 
which it had not in itself, but also turning forth fco 
sight its own more subtle and spiritual meanings. 
And since the noblest life on earth is always human 
life, the literature which deals with human life must 
always be the noblest literature. And since the indi- 
vidual human life must always have a distinctness and 
interest which cannot belong to any of the groups of 
human lives, biography must always have a charm 
which no other kind of history can rival. 



180 BIOGRAPHY. 

I think that I would rather have written a great 
biography than a great book of any other sort, as I 
would rather have painted a great portrait than any 
other kind of picture. At any rate, the writing of a 
biography, or, indeed, the proper reading of it, re- 
quires one faculty which is not very common, and which 
does not come into action without some experience. 
It requires the power of large vital imagination, the 
power of conceiving of a life as a whole. Do you 
remember, when you were a child, how vague the city 
which you lived in was to you? Certain houses in 
the city, certain streets, you knew; but the city as a 
whole, — Boston, or Springfield, or New York, — one 
total thing, — you had to grow older and make more 
associations, and get more ideality, before you could 
lay hold of that. You had to comprehend it, to grasp 
around it, as it were. So it is with a life. To know 
the list of Napoleon's achievements, to be able to 
quote a page of Carlyle's writings, — that is one 
thing; but to have Napoleon Bonaparte or Thomas 
Carlyle stand out distinct, a complete being by him- 
self, a unit among unities, like a mountain rising out 
of the plain, like a star shining in the sky, — that is 
another thing and very different. That needs a spe- 
cial power. He who has not that power is not fit to 
read, much less fit to write, a biography. 

It must always be a noteworthy fact that the great 
book of the world is the story of a life. The New 
Testament is a biography. Make it a mere book of 
dogmas, and its vitality is gone. Make it a book of 
laws, and it grows hard and untimely. Make it a 
biography, and it is a true book of life. Make it 
the history of Jesus of Nazareth, and the world holds 
it in its heart forever. Not simply his coming or his 



BIOGRAPHY. 181 

going, not simply his birth or his death, but the liv- 
ing, the total life, of Jesus is the world's salvation. 
And the Book in which his life shines orbed and 
distinct is the world's treasure. There, as in all 
best biographies, two values of a marked and well- 
depicted life appear. It is of value, first, because it 
is exceptional, and also because it is representative. 
Every life is at once like and unlike every other. 
Every good story of a life, therefore, sets before those 
who read it something which is imitable and some- 
thing which is incapable of imitation ; and thereby 
come two different sorts of stimulus and inspiration. 
It gives us help like that of the stars which guide the 
ship from without, and also like that of the fire which 
burns beneath the engines of the ship itself. 

But let me come to my Lecture. I want to divide 
what I have to say to you about biographies into three 
parts. I want to speak to you about the subjects of 
biographies, and the writers of biographies, and the 
readers of biographies. A life must first be lived, 
and then it must be written, and then it must be read, 
before the power of a biography is quite complete. 

You sit some day in your study reading Boswell's 
Johnson. Are there not three people holding com- 
munion with one another in that silent room, — John- 
son and Boswell and you? Johnson lived the life, 
Boswell wrote it, you are reading it. It is like the 
sun, the atmosphere, and the earth, making one sys- 
tem. The sun shines through the atmosphere to give 
the earth its warmth and richness. This is what 
makes every picture of a man reading and being in- 
fluenced by a biography an interesting thing. It is 
the completeness of this group of three. John Stuart 



182 BIOGRAPHY. 

Mill tells us about the inspiration which came to him, 
when he was a young man, from Plato's Pictures of 
Socrates. And, among modern biographies, he re- 
members the value which he found in Condorcet's 
Life of Turgot, " a book," he says, " well calculated 
to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains 
one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by 
one of the wisest and noblest of men." In that sen- 
tence you can see the three together, — Turgot, Con- 
dorcet, and Mill. In another part of his autobiog- 
raphy the same great Englishman records how he was 
rescued from extreme depression by the reading of 
something in the Memoirs of Marmontel, the most pic- 
turesque of literary histories. Or one likes to think of 
Dr. Franklin lying on what proved to be his death- 
bed and listening to the reading of Johnson's Lives 
of the Poets. There is something very impressive in 
letting our imagination picture the stately and sono- 
rous Doctor bringing in and introducing the singers 
one by one before the calm eyes of the homely but 
sympathetic philosopher. You ought never to read a 
biography without letting such a group construct itself 
for your imagination. Johnson, and Boswell, and 
you, — all three are there : the subject, the author, 
and the reader. Your reading will be a live thing if 
you can feel the presence of your two companions, and 
make them, as it were, feel yours. 

1. Let me speak, then, first, about the subjects of 
biographies. I believe fully that the intrinsic life of 
any human being is so interesting, that if it can be 
simply and sympathetically put in words it will be 
legitimately interesting to other men. Have you 
never noticed how anybody, boy or man, who talks to 



BIOGRAPHY. 183 

you about himself compels your attention ? I say 
" who talks about himself." I mean, of course, his 
true self. If he talks about an unreal, an affected, 
an imaginary self, a self which he would like to seem 
to be, instead of the self he really is, he tires and dis- 
gusts you ; but be sure of this, that there is not one of 
us living to-day so simple and monotonous a life that, 
if he be true and natural, his life faithfully written 
would not be worthy of men's eyes and hold men's 
hearts. Not one of us, therefore, who, if he be true, 
and pure, and natural, may not, though his life never 
should be written, be interesting and stimulating to 
his fellow-men in some small circle as they touch his 
life. 

It is this truth which accounts for the power of the 
simplest kind of biographies, — those which record 
the lives of obscure people who have done no note- 
worthy w r ork in the world. I think of two such books. 
One of them is the " Story of Ida," the life of an 
Italian girl of exquisite character, and whose life was 
the very pattern of a humble tragedy. Mr. Euskin, 
in his introduction to the book, says, with his usual 
exaggeration, that " the lives in which the public are 
interested are hardly ever worth writing." That, of 
course, is quite untrue. But he goes on to praise and 
introduce a sweet and simple story, which is a delight- 
ful illustration of the truth he overstates. It is like a 
flower plucked out of the thousands of the field which, 
besides the charm of its own fragrance, has the other 
value, that it reminds us how fragrant are all the 
flowers which still grow unplucked in the field from 
which this came. The other book is very different. 
It is Thomas Hughes's " Memoir of a Brother," the 
story of a brave, hopeful, consecrated life, which came 



184 BIOGRAPHY. 

to no display, but did its duty out of sight and under 
endless disappointment, as the stream wrestles with 
the hindrances which stop its channel deep in the un- 
trodden woods. 

These are the lives which give us faith in human 
nature, the lives which now and then it is good for 
somebody to write, if only to remind us how possible 
it is for such lives to be lived. 

But we must not let ourselves be misled by such 
a statement as that which I quoted from Mr. Ruskin, 
so far as to think that notable and exceptional lives 
are not peculiarly entitled to biography. Distinction 
is a legitimate object of our interest, if we do not 
over-estimate its value. Distinction is the emphasis 
put upon qualities by circumstances. He who lis- 
tens to the long music of human history hears the 
special stress with which some great human note was 
uttered long ago, ringing down the ages and min- 
gling with and enriching the later music of modern 
days. It is a perfectly legitimate curiosity with which 
men ask about that resonant, far-reaching life. They 
are probably asking with a deeper impulse than they 
know. They are dimly aware that in that famous, in- 
teresting man their own humanity — which it is end- 
lessly pathetic to see how men are always trying and 
always failing to understand — is felt pulsating at one 
of its most sensitive and vital points. Let us think, 
then, of some of the kinds of famous men whom our 
biographies embalm. 

The first class of men whose lives ought specially 
to be written and read are those rare men who pre- 
sent broad pictures of the healthiest and simplest 
qualities of human nature most largely and attrac- 
tively displayed. Not men of eccentricities, not men 



BIOGRAPHY. 185 

of specialties, but men of universal inspiration and 
appeal, — men, shall we not say, like Shakespeare's 
Horatio, to whom poor distracted Hamlet cries : — 

" Thou art e'en as just a man 
As e'er my conversation coped with all." 

How heavily and confidently always the disturbed soul 
rests on simple justice. 

I shall quote as illustrations in all my Lecture only 
the biographies of English-speaking men by English- 
speaking men. And in this first category of biog- 
raphies, preeminent for their broad humanness, their 
general healthiness of thought and being, I do not 
hesitate a moment which to name. There are two 
lives which stand out clearly as the two best biogra- 
phies ever written in the English language. Carlyle 
says, " In England we have simply one good biog- 
raphy, this BoswelFs Johnson." Certainly there is 
one other worthy to be set beside it, which is Lock- 
hart's Scott. Happy the boy who very early gets at 
those two books, and feels and feeds upon the broad 
and rich humanity of the two men whom they keep 
ever picturesque and living. Johnson and Scott, — so 
human in their strength and in their weakness, in 
their virtues and in their faults : one like a day of 
clouds and storms, the other like a day of sunshine 
and bright breezes, yet both like Nature, both real in 
times of unreality, both going bravely and christianly 
into that darkness and tragicalness which gathered at 
the last on both their lives, — two men worthy of hav- 
ing their lives written, fortunate both in the biogra- 
phers who wrote their lives ; worthy to be read and 
re-read, and read again by all men who want to keep 
their manhood healthy, broad, and brave, and true ! 



186 BIOGRAPHY. 

Set these two great books first, then, easily first, 
among English biographies. The streets of London 
and the streets of Edinburgh live to-day with the 
images of these two men more than any others of the 
millions who have walked in them. But in a broader 
way the streets of human nature still live with their 
presence. The unfading interest in Dr. Johnson is 
one of the good signs of English character. Men do 
not read his books, but they never cease to care about 
him. It shows what hold the best and broadest hu- 
man qualities always keep on the heart of man. This 
man, who had to be coaxed into favor before a request 
could be asked, and whose friends and equals were 
afraid to remonstrate with him except by a round- 
robin, was yet capable of the truest delicacy, the 
purest modesty, the most religious love for all that 
was greater and better than himself. But the great 
value of him was his reality. He was a perpetual pro- 
test against the artificialness and unreality of that 
strange eighteenth century in which he lived. And 
Walter Scott, who was thirteen years old when Dr. 
Johnson died, bore witness for true humanity in the 
next century, when men were beginning to delight in 
that Byronic scorn of life which has deepened into the 
pessimism of these later days, by the healthy and 
cheery faith with which he accepted the fact that, as 
he once wrote, " We have all our various combats to 
fight in the best of all possible worlds, and like brave 
fellow-soldiers ought to assist one another as much as 
possible." 

Yes, it is good for each new generation of English- 
speaking boys as they come on to the stage of life to 
find two such brave figures there already. Genera- 
tions come and go, but these two brave men still keep 



BIOGRAPHY. 187 

possession of the stage, and do no man can say how 
much to make and keep life ever brave and true. 

We come to a distinctly different type of biogra- 
phy when we pass on to speak of those men whose 
written lives have value not from their broad human- 
ity, but from the way in which they gather up and 
throw out into clear light some certain period of the 
world's history, some special stage of human life. 
Wonderful is this power which an age has to select 
one of its men, and crowd itself into him and hold 
him up before the world and say, "Know me by 
him ! ' " The age of Pericles," we say, or, " The 
age of Lorenzo de Medici," and all our study of the 
history of the fifth century before Christ, or of the 
fifteenth century after Christ, could not put us into 
such clear possession of those remarkable times as we 
should have if we really could know Pericles or the 
great Lorenzo. Of all such books for us Americans 
the greatest must be Irving's " Life of Washington." 
" Washington," says Irving, " had very little private 
life." All the more for that reason it is true that if 
you master the public life of Washington you have 
learned how this nation came to be. His early share 
in the French and Indian wars, which was like a trial- 
trip of the ship which was afterwards to fight with 
broader seas, his sympathy with the first discontents, 
his slow approach to the idea of Independence, his 
steadfastness during the war, his passage out of mili- 
tary back to civil life, all of these make his career 
characteristic. It is the history of the time, all crowded 
by a sort of composite photograph into him. Wash- 
ington was by no means the cold, unromantic, passion- 
less monster that men have sometimes, pictured him 
to be. It was not lack of qualities but poise of qual- 



188 BIOGRAPHY. 

ities that made him calm. It was not absence of color 
but harmony of color that made his life white and 
transparent. And so it is with no disparagement of 
the personal nature of our great man that we may- 
claim as the special value of his life the way in which 
it sums up in itself the picturesque beginnings of our 
history. Read it for that. Read also Wirt's " Life 
of Patrick Henry," which is the story of another na- 
ture like a lens, more brilliant but not less true than 
Washington's. 

And thus of many ages you will find, if you look for 
it, the graphic man, who stands forever after his age 
has passed away as its picture and its commentary. 
Would you know what sort of a thing English life 
was in the fifteenth century, the age of the Inquisi- 
tion, of the Spanish Armada, of the discovery of 
America, of the Field of the Cloth of Gold? Read 
the direct and simple English of the "Life of Cardinal 
Wolsey," by his gentleman usher, George Cavendish. 
Would you catch the spirit of adventure which filled 
the breezy days of Queen Elizabeth? Would you 
feel the throb of newly found rivers beating through 
a great new discovered continent? Would you see 
the flashes of color and hear the bursts of song which 
came back in those days from mysterious countries 
which scientific discovery had not yet disenchanted of 
their poetry and reduced to prose ? Would you know 
what it was to live in one of the mornings of the 
world when all the birds were singing and all the east- 
ern heavens were aglow ? Read the " Life of Walter 
Raleigh," as it has come down to us without a writer's 
name from some enthusiastic biographer of his own 
time. 

Demand everywhere that the inarticulate life of a 



BIOGRAPHY. 189 

time shall utter itself in the life of its typical man, as 
a brooding, smouldering fire bursts forth at one point 
into flame. Do not feel that you know any age or 
country till you can clearly see its characteristic man. 

The same is true about a critical event. You think 
about the great English Revolution, that convulsion 
of the seventeenth century which broke the power of 
privilege in state and church and made possible all 
that is happening in England and America to-day, all 
that is going to happen in the next hundred years, 
which a man would so like to live and see. How shall 
you get the spirit and soul and meaning of that great 
event, and seem to have actually seen it as it came ? 
You must know its great man. You must study the 
life of Oliver Cromwell, upon whom the true histor- 
ical instinct of Carlyle has fastened as the man who 
really did the thing, as much, that is, as any one man 
did it, as much as any one man ever does anything in 
history. You must get deep into him. You must see 
how he led and was led ; how he made his times and 
was made by them ; how impossible it is to take him 
in imagination out of those times and set him down 
in any other. It does not mean that you are to make 
him slavishly your hero and think everything he did 
was right, but get the man, his hates, his loves, his 
dreams, his blundering hopes, his noble, hot, half- 
forged purposes, his faith, his doubt, get all of these 
in one vehement person clear before your soul, and 
then you will know how privilege had to go and lib- 
erty had to come in England and America. 

And as an age or an event, so an occupation or a 
profession reveals itself in a biography. Many of 
our great libraries now are divided and arranged both 
horizontally and perpendicularly. All the books on 



190 BIOGRAPHY. 

one level belong to the same subject ; all the books in 
one upright stack belong to the same nation. So it is 
with men in history. You may think of all the peo- 
ple in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, engaged in all 
their different works. That is the horizontal concep- 
tion. Or you may think of all the poets, or all the 
carpenters, or all the sailors in the whole series of 
ages. That is the perpendicularity of history. If you 
take the latter view, then, you want some man in each 
profession who shall make that profession a reality to 
you. Do you not know what a soldier is, as no ab- 
stract book could teach you, when you have read the 
pages which our great American soldier wrote in the 
days which he so piteously begged of death a little time 
to tell the story of his life ? He who would under- 
stand the true life of a pure scholar, let him read the 
delightful story of Isaac Casaubon, which was written 
a few years ago by Mark Pattison, or, shall we say, 
the life of the pugnacious Richard Bentley, which was 
written by Bishop Monk, the very model of a scholar's 
life of a scholar ? If you want to see what it may be 
to be a minister, do not look at the parson of your 
parish, but read Brooke's " Life of Robertson." When 
you want to know how bravely and brightly the true 
lover and questioner of nature may pass his days, let 
the life of that healthiest of naturalists, Frank Buck- 
land, be your teacher. Let adventure shine before 
you in the life of Livingstone. In every occupation 
you will find some representative, some man who did 
that thing most healthily and truly. It would be good, 
I think, if in those critical years, sometimes so anxi- 
ously, sometimes so very lightly passed, in which men 
are deciding what they are to do with this mysterious 
gift of God which we call life, some wise and sympa- 



BIOGRAPHY. 191 

thetic teacher, in the college or elsewhere, should hold 
a class in professional biography, and make the most 
representative man of each profession tell not by his 
lips, but by his life, what sort of man, and what sort 
of career his occupation makes. It might save, here 
and there, a foolish choice and an unhappy life. 

And yet, again, there is another class of biographies 
which gives us types, neither of times, nor of events, 
nor of professions, but of characters. Have you ever 
read Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs, the most 
open-hearted of autobiographers, and felt his cheery, 
self -conceited voice bragging in your ear? — the very 
perfection of that strange fantastic thing which his 
strange century took for a gentleman, the selfish bully 
still dazzling his own eyes and other men's with the 
glare of personal courage and an easy generosity. 
Put alongside of his the noble story which has lately 
been given to the world by Leslie Stephen, of his 
friend Henry Fawcett, the blind statesman who, with 
infinite patience and assiduity and resolution and in- 
telligence, conquered the prizes of usefulness and 
honor in the darkness ; or, turning to the higher 
power of religion, read the story of the manly piety 
of Havelock, the missionary faith of Patterson, or the 
calm progress out of unbelief into a trust in God as 
the one refuge of the soul of the fine intellect of Ellen 
Watson, — read these, which are the three best and 
most healthy religious biographies I know, and feel 
how character is not a thing of which you can tell the 
nature in a list of qualities. It is something human : 
you must see it in a man ; you must watch it kindling 
in an eye ; you must hear it ringing in a voice ; and 
so biographies are the best sermons. 

Our first feeling, I suppose, is that all great men 



192 BIOGRAPHY. 

ought to have their biographies, that all fine lives are 
capable of being finely written. And yet we find out 
by and by that some great men, some very great men, 
are unsuited for biography. Shakespeare has no biog- 
raphy; and, much as we would like to know what 
happened to him in his life, I think we all feel doubt- 
ful whether we should get much of increased and 
deepened richness in our thought of him if what he 
did and said had been recorded. The poet's life is in 
his poems. The more profoundly and spiritually he 
is a poet, the more thoroughly this is true, the more 
impossible a biography of him becomes. Where is 
the life of Shelley that gives you any notion of the 
beauty of his soul ? The Skylark and the Cenci and 
the Adonais are the real events in his history. You 
fill yourself with them and you know him. The same 
is true of Wordsworth. There is not, there cannot 
be, any very valuable biography of him. For this rea- 
son, I think that the young reader ought to become 
well accustomed to reading the whole works of an 
author whom he really wants to know. I believe in 
those long, comely series of books labelled Complete 
Works. If you read a poet's masterpieces, you know 
them. If you have read everything which he has 
written, you know him. When you have become con- 
vinced that some great author, particularly some great 
poet, is really worthy of your study, that you must 
have him not simply as a recreation of an idle hour 
but as the companion of your life, then go and get all 
his works ; put them, as near as may be, in the order 
in which he wrote them, and read them once, at least, 
straight through from end to end. Let your library, 
as it slowly grows, abound in " complete works ; " so 
you have men, entire men, upon your shelves, if you 



BIOGRAPHY. 193 

are man enough to bid them live for you. This is, 
after all, the subtlest form in which the biography of 
writing men can take its shape, and for many writing 
men it is the only form of biography which is pos- 
sible. 

I must not say more about the subjects of biog- 
raphy. These kinds of men which I have hurriedly 
named are the kinds of men about whom other men 
will ask, and so about whom books will be written. 
These are the stars which, being in the heaven of 
human life, and having some special color or some 
special light, must shine. There are others no less 
true and worthy of men's sight than they, which no 
man sees. 

I want to speak now of the men who write biog- 
raphies, the authors. And, first of all, there are the 
men who are their own biographers, — the men who, 
as the end of life approaches, gather up their experi- 
ences and tell the world about themselves before they 
go. In the great Uffizi Gallery at Florence there is 
a large assemblage of the portraits of the great artists, 
painted by themselves. Nobody can enter that vast, 
splendid room, thronged with its silent company, and 
not be conscious of a special sacredness and awe. 
Here is the way in which the great artists looked to 
themselves. Thus it was that Raphael saw the painter 
of the Sistine Madonna, and thus Leonardo conceived 
the painter of the Last Supper. It is the man him- 
self telling the story of himself to himself. No won- 
der that each stands out there with a peculiarly clear 
and personal distinctness. 

What that room is in art, a library of autobiog- 
raphies is in human life. People like to tell us that 



194 BIOGRAPHY. 

we do not know ourselves so well as our neighbors 
know us. I rather think that few maxims are less 
true than that. Our neighbors know our little tricks, 
of which we are unconscious ; but any one of us who 
is at all thoughful knows his real heart and nature 
as no other man has begun to know them. There- 
fore, he who will really tell us about himself makes his 
life stand forth very distinctly in its unity, its sepa- 
rateness, its reality. 

English literature is rich in autobiography. It has, 
indeed, no tale so deep and subtle as that which is 
told in the Confessions of St. Augustine. It has no 
such complete and unreserved unbosoming of a life as 
is given by the strange Italian, Benvenuto Cellini, 
who is the very prince of unconcealment. But there 
is hardly any self-told life in any language which is 
more attractive than the autobiography of Edward 
Gibbon, in which he recounts the story of his own 
career in the same stately, pure prose in which he 
narrates the Decline and Fall of Rome. It must 
have needed a great faith in a man's self to write those 
sonorous pages. Two passages in them have passed 
into the history of man. One is that in which he de- 
scribes how, in Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, 
as he sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while 
the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the 
Temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline 
and fall of the city first started in his mind. The 
other is the passage in which the great historian re- 
cords how, on the night of the 27th of June, 1787, 
between the hours of eleven and twelve, he wrote the 
last lines of the last page in a summer-house at Lau- 
sanne, and how then, laying down his pen, he " took 
several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, 



BIOGRAPHY. 195 

which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, 
and the mountains." The story is all very solemn 
and exalted. It is full of the feeling that the begin- 
ning and ending of a great literary work is as great 
an achievement as the foundation and completion of 
an empire, — as worthy of record and of honor ; and 
as we read we feel so too. 

A greater autobiography than Edward Gibbon's is 
our own Benjamin Franklin's. Franklin had exactly 
the genius and temperament of an autobiographer. 
He loved and admired himself ; but he was so bent 
upon analysis and measurement that he could not 
let even himself pass without discrimination. The 
style is like Defoe. Indeed, we are pleased to find 
that he placed great value both on Defoe and Bun- 
yan, whose stories are told so like his own. He 
watches his own life as he watched one of his own 
philosophical experiments. He flies his existence as 
he flew his kite, and he tells the world about it all 
just as a thoughtful boy might tell his mother what he 
had been doing, — sure of her kindly interest in him. 
The world is like a mother to Ben Franklin always : 
so domestic and familiar is his thought of her. He 
who has read this book has always afterwards the 
boy-man who wrote it clear and distinct among the 
men he knows. 

Of autobiographies of our own time there are three 
which are full of characteristic life. There is John 
Stuart Mill's life of himself, so wonderfully cold, and 
calm, and clear, yet with the warmth of subdued pos- 
sibilities of passion always burning in it, — a very sea 
of glass, mingled with fire. There is the story of 
James Nasmyth, the Scotch engineer and astronomer, 
written by himself, — the happiest life, in the most nat- 



196 BIOGRAPHY. 

ural and simple elements of happiness, I think, that 
one can find. And I must add, although we have only 
a fragment of it yet, the autobiography of General 
Grant, the soldier who hated war ; the American who 
had the spirit of the institutions of his country filling 
him ; the author who, without literary training or pre- 
tension, or almost, one may say, the literary sense at 
all, has written in a style which has this great quality, 
that it is like a simple, brave, true man's talk. 

Let men like these talk to you and tell you of them- 
selves. Being dead, they yet can speak. How good 
it is sometimes to leave the crowded world, which is 
so hot about its trifles, and go into the company of 
these great souls which are so calm about the most 
momentous things ! 

Next to the autobiography comes the life which is 
written by some one who is of near kindred or of close 
association with the man of whom he writes. In such 
lives the feeling of gratitude and personal friendship 
comes in and makes an atmosphere which takes in him 
who reads as well as the subject and the author of the 
book. Of such biographies there is no happier or 
more fascinating instance than the Memoir of Profes- 
sor Agassiz which Mrs. Agassiz gave to the world a 
few months ago. It is the picture of a sweet, strong 
nature turning in its first young simplicity to noble 
things, and keeping its simplicity through a long life 
by its perpetual association with them. It is a human 
creature loving the earth almost as we can imagine 
that a beast loves it, and yet at the same time study- 
ing it like a wise man. The sea and the glacier tell 
him their secrets. In his very dreams the extinct 
fishes build again for him their lost construction. 
There is a cool, bright freshness in every page. The 



BIOGRAPHY. 197 

boy of twenty-two rolls himself in the snow for joy. 
The man has himself let down a hundred and twenty- 
five feet into the cold, blue, wonderful crevasse to see 
how the ice is made. Finally, the New World tempts 
him, and he becomes the apostle of science to America. 
All this is told us out of the lips which have the best 
right to tell it. 

Take another biography. I do not know whether 
you boys are inclined to think that if you were school- 
teachers you would want to have one of your scholars 
write your history. There is a common notion about 
school life, — one of the stupid traditions which have 
an ounce of truth to eleven ounces of falsehood in 
them, — that school-teachers and school-boys are nat- 
ural foes and cannot understand each other. And yet 
Arthur Stanley wrote the life of Dr. Thomas Arnold, 
his teacher in the old school at Rugby, in such a way 
that the great master's fame has been set like a jewel 
firm and bright in the record of the nineteenth cen- 
tury; and school-teaching owes no little of its new 
dignity and attractiveness to that delightful book. It 
has added a name to history, and almost a new sister 
to the family of the high arts. 

Suppose that you could have the privilege of sitting 
down with Mrs. Agassiz and hearing her tell of the 
great naturalist and the enthusiastic, child -hearted, 
lion-hearted man ! Suppose that you could walk with 
Dean Stanley and hear him tell about his great mas- 
ter, to whom he owed so much of his learning and his 
character ! You can do both these things if you will 
read these books. The nature of the men they write 
of will come through the kindred natures and the 
warm love of those who write about them. It is sun- 
shine poured through sunlight. So the story of Wil- 



198 BIOGRAPHY. 

liam Lloyd Garrison, told by his children, has a cer- 
tain richness about it which comes from the sympathy 
with his work which was fed in the home and at the 
very table of the great emancipator when these biog- 
raphers were boys. So the life of Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne, by Julian Hawthorne, while it has the faults 
has also much of the charm which belongs to a son's 
life of a father, — the charm of ancestral genius re- 
flected through an hereditary genius like itself. 

Besides these two, the autobiography and the friend's 
biography, there remains the great mass of biographies 
which must of necessity be the work of authors far 
removed from the subjects about whom they write, 
perhaps of quite different habits and associations. 
The biographer of M. Pasteur calls the book which 
tells his story, "La Vie d'un Savant par un ignorant," 
and as we read we easily see that there is some advan- 
tage for us in the fact that the author who writes 
writes from the outside, and is not himself a proficient 
in the knowledge and the art in which the great French 
naturalist excels. There is a quiet school-master at 
Harrow who spends his placid life in hearing school- 
boy lessons all day long, who, nevertheless, has written 
a biography of a soldier, a statesman, a ruler of men, 
— the picturesque and heroic Lord Lawrence, ruler 
of the Punjaub and subduer of the Indian mutiny, — 
which makes that terrible time live again and all its 
awful lessons burn like fire. This noble and most 
interesting book of Bosworth Smith is a fine instance 
of the kind of biography whose writer is neither 
bound by kindred nor identified by similarity of oc- 
cupation with his hero. This author had never even 
seen the far-off gorgeous India in which his drama 
was enacted, nor had he had anything to do with mili- 



BIOGRAPHY. 199 

tary life. Such books as his mean something differ- 
ent from the personal interest in one's own life from 
which comes the autobiography, something different 
from the desire to raise a monument to a dear friend, 
or to perpetuate a special bit of history. They mean 
that large and healthy sense which feels that every 
strong human career must have in it, whatever its par- 
ticular field of action may have been, something which 
belongs to all humanity, and which it will do all hu- 
man creatures good to know. Such a book, therefore, 
is a token of the humanness both of him who writes it 
and of him about whom it is written. Take another. 
Take Professor Masson's Life of John Milton. He 
who wants to know what was done in England during 
the great years which filled the middle of the seven- 
teenth century may read that book, and one might 
almost say that he need read no other, so vitally does 
the great Puritan poet stand in the centre of the great 
tumult of human life, and so vitally does the human- 
ity of his biographer feel him standing there. 

Great as is the charm which other writers have, this 
writer, who writes solely because the man of whom 
he writes seems to him to belong to all mankind and 
to have something to say to every age, must always 
have a charm deeper than any other. Great is he 
who in some special vocation, as a soldier, a governor, 
a scientist, does good and helpful work for fellow-man. 
Greater still is he who, doing good work in his special 
occupation, carries within his devotion to it a human 
nature so rich and true that it breaks through his pro- 
fession and claims the love and honor of his fellow- 
men, simply and purely as a man. His is the life 
which some true human eye discerns, and some loving 
and grateful hand makes the subject of a picture to 
which all men enthusiastically turn. 



200 BIOGRAPHY. 

I cannot help fearing that in my evening's talk thus 
far I have hastily named too many of the great works 
of biography with which our literature is filled, and 
so have not made so clear as I should wish the subject 
of biography in general. It is a bad fault always so 
to paint the picture that men cannot see the forest 
for the trees. If, however, I have tempted any of 
my young hearers to read any of the books which I 
have named, my fault has not been wholly faulty. 
But as I pass on to say a few words of my third topic, 
the Eeader of Biography, let me speak more gener- 

ally. 

First of all, what must the reader bring in order to 
get the real life out of the biography he reads ? I 
answer in one word, a true life of his own. Reading 
the story of a man whom you admire, whose charac- 
ter is bright and splendid before you, may be the 
worst thing you can do, unless you meet it with a 
character and manhood which turns what you read 
into your own shape and appropriates this other man's 
vitality into its own. The object of reading biog- 
raphy, it cannot be too earnestly or too often said, is 
not imitation, but inspiration. Imitation does not re- 
quire life ; inspiration does. For imitation you need 
nothing but a lump of clay or putty ; for inspiration 
you must have a pair of lungs. When will all teach- 
ers and all scholars learn that behind all acquirements 
there must lie character and powers, behind all learn- 
ing you must have life ? Before you can get mental 
training you must get a mind ; before you can learn 
to live well you must learn to live ; before one can 
become something one must be something. " To him 
that hath," so Jesus tells us, " to him shall be given." 
Therefore, to the lives of other men you must carry a 



BIOGRAPHY. 201 

true life of your own, — convictions, intentions, resolu- 
tions, a true character. Then your career will not be 
swamped by theirs, though theirs may give to yours 
color and direction ; then they will make you wiser, 
stronger, braver, but they will leave you still yourself. 
Here is the only danger which I know in the reading 
of biographies, lest he who reads shall lose himself, 
shall come to be not himself, but the feeble repetition 
of some other man. It is the danger which attends 
all friendship, all personal intercourse of man with 
man. Your own responsibilities, your own chances, 
your own thoughts, your own hopes, your own religion, 
which are different from those of any other man who 
ever lived, those you must keep sacred, and then sum- 
mon the inspiration of the greatest and most vital men 
whom you can find to touch your life with their fire, 
and make you not what they are, but more thoroughly 
and energetically yourself. 

And, then, bringing and keeping this life of his 
own, what sort of biographies shall any special young 
man select to read ? Two sorts, I answer. Those of 
men most like himself in character and vocation, and 
those of men who are most unlike. Let him read the 
first sort for light and intensity ; let him read the 
second for sympathy and breadth. Here is a young 
naturalist. Let him read the life of Agassiz of which 
I spoke. What preparation can be better for the life 
that is to deal immediately with nature than to see 
how nature filled and satisfied a very large, rich hu- 
man life ; what a great, fresh, happy, and hopeful man 
it made ; how sacred nature was to him ? Such a life 
well read must rescue the pursuit of natural science 
from its abstractness, and clothe it with human inter- 
est. Before I undertake any work, I think that it 



202 BIOGRAPHY. 

will do me good to meet, and walk through the pages 
of his biography with, the best and greatest man who 
ever did that thing before. My work, when I go forth 
to do it, will seem at once more real and more ideal, 
more familiar and more exalted, for such reading. 
But at the same time my young naturalist should also 
read such a book as Dr. Holmes's Life of Emerson, 
He should see how full of strength and goodness a 
man might be who knew nothing of scientific studies ; 
he should learn the poetic and philosophic values of 
the stars, and the mountains, and the field ; he should 
provide himself with humility by learning the dignity 
and worth of thought and knowledge, which it is be- 
yond his power or outside of his range to attain. 
These two lives together, one showing him the great- 
ness of what he can do, the other showing him the 
greatness of what he cannot do ; one making his pur- 
pose more intense, the other making his sympathy 
more extensive ; both of them he should read with 
reverence and love. 

And how should a biography be read ? I answer, 
with as little of the literary sense as possible. A 
biography is, indeed, a book ; but far more than it is 
a book it is a man. Insist on seeing and knowing 
the man whom it enshrines. Never lay the biography 
down until the man is a living, breathing, acting per- 
son to you. Then you may close, and lose, and forget 
the book ; the man is yours forever. It is a poor tele- 
scope that keeps you thinking of its lens and does not 
make you possess the star. I said about an hour ago 
that the great Christian book was a biography. The 
Gospels are the greatest biography that was ever writ- 
ten. And how little literary feeling there is about 
the Gospels. How we hardly think about them as 



BIOGRAPHY. 203 

a book. How it is the blessed man whom we see 
through their colorless transparency that occupies our 
attention and our thoughts! To read a biography 
must be to see a man, — Johnson or Scott or Macau- 
lay. Boswell or Lockhart or Trevelyan must only be 
the friend who brings the two, you and Johnson or 
Macaulay or Scott, together. 

I think that the reading of many biographies ought 
to be begun in the middle. It seems a disorderly sug- 
gestion, but it has reason in it. It is the way in which 
you come to know a man. You touch his life at some 
point in its course ; you find it full of attractive activ- 
ity 5 y ou grow interested in what he is doing. So you 
grow interested in him, and then, not till then, you care 
to know how he came to be what you find him, — what 
his training was ; what his youth was ; who his par- 
ents were, perhaps who his ancestors were, and who 
was the first man of his name who came over to Amer- 
ica, and where that progenitor's other descendants 
have settled. The same is true, I think, of a biog- 
raphy. Indeed, I have often wondered whether a 
biography might not be written in that way. Let 
the Life of General Grant begin with the story of 
Shiloh or of Vicksburg, and when that glowing nar- 
rative has thoroughly interested the reader in the 
great soldier, then let us hear about the childhood in 
Ohio, and the early life at West Point, and St. Louis, 
and Galena. Probably biographers will not write so 
for us ; but we may sometimes read thus the biogra- 
phies which they have written in the dull order of 
chronology, and find them full of livelier and deeper 
interest. 

And now what is it all for ? I must not talk so 



204 BIOGRAPHY. 

long as I have talked to-night, about a certain kind 
of literature, and urge you to give it a high place in 
your reading without trying, before I close, to gather 
up in simple statement the good results which have 
come to many, and which will come to you from an 
intelligent reading of biography. I mention four par- 
ticulars. 

It gives reality to foreign lands and distant times. 
There is no land so foreign and no time so distant 
that a familiar personality, set by imagination in the 
midst of it, will not make it familiar. Some friend 
of yours goes to live in Venice or Bombay, and 
how immediately your vision of that remote scene 
brightens into vividness. The place belongs to you. 
The Grand Canal and the Caves of Elephanta are 
real things. You see your friend floating on the 
" tremulous street," or losing himself in the gloom 
of the solemn cavern. Or you are able to picture to 
yourself how this other friend would have behaved 
in the days of Luther. You can imagine him back 
into the tumult of the Reformation. And straight- 
way the Reformation days are here. Luther is de- 
nouncing Tetzel in your study. Biography does the 
same thing for us, only better. It takes the man 
who really lived in Venice or Bombay or Wittenburg 
and makes him real. It makes him live, and straight- 
way all his time and place lives with him, as all the 
heavens spring into glory when the sun clothes itself 
with light. With each man who becomes a living 
being to you, a whole new world comes into being. 
Each new man is a new sun. In all our minds there 
are regions of recognized but unrealized space and 
time, only waiting for us to set a real living human 
life into the midst of them to make them open into 
reality and glow with life. 



BIOGRAPHY. 205 

Still more important and interesting are the regions 
of thought which are unreal to me until some man 
stands in the midst of them and lights them up. I 
read the history of metaphysics. I open and study 
the great heavy tomes. If my tastes are in quite other 
directions I say, " How dull this whole thing is ! How 
vague and dreary these abstractions are ! " And then 
I turn and read the life of some great metaphysician, 
and how everything is changed. I do not understand 
this great science any more than I did before, but I 
see him understand it. The enthusiasm trembles in 
his voice, the light kindles in his eye, as he talks and 
looks upon these abstract propositions which appeared 
to me so dreary. It cannot be but that they catch his 
light. The whole world which they make is real to 
me through his reality. My universe is larger by this 
great expanse. So one world after another kindles 
into vividness when I see its human inhabitant. The 
world of music, the world of mathematics, the world 
of politics, the world of charity, the world of religion, 
each is a real world to me when in the midst of it 
stands its real man. 

Again, think what must be the effect upon per- 
sonal character of the reading of a great biography. 
If it is really a great life greatly told, like Johnson's, 
or like Scott's, two convictions grow up in us as we 
read : first, this man was vastly greater than I can 
ever be; and, second, this man, great as he is, is of 
the same human sort that I am of, and so I may at- 
tain to the same kind of greatness which he reached. 
The first conviction brings humility, the second brings 
encouragement. And humility and encouragement to- 
gether, each by its very presence saving the other 
from the vices to which it is most inclined, these are 



206 BIOGRAPHY. 

the elements which make the noblest character and 
the happiest life. To be humble because we are our- 
selves ; to be courageous because we are part of the 
great humanity, and because all that any man in any 
time has done in some true sense belongs to us, in 
some true sense we did it ; to catch the two certain- 
ties, one of the identity of mankind and the other 
of the essential and eternal distinctness of every man, 
even the most cheap and insignificant ; to hold these 
two convictions in their true poise and proportion ; to 
let them make for us one unity of character, this is 
a large part of the secret of good living, and no kind 
of book helps us to this so much as a good biog- 
raphy. 

But, finally, may we not say that the supreme bless- 
ing of biography is that it is always bathing the spe- 
cial in the universal, and so renewing its vitality and 
freshness ? Our little habits grow so hard. We get 
so set in our small ways of doing things. We be- 
come creatures of this moment of time on which we 
happen to have fallen. The power of dull fashion 
and routine takes possession not merely of the way we 
dress and talk, but of the way we think. Our schools 
have their cheap little standards, and our colleges 
have theirs, and our professions theirs, and every duty 
makes more of the way in which it is done than of 
the divine meaning and motive of doing it at all ; all 
gets to seem parched and hardened like a midsummer 
plain, and then you take up your great biography and 
as you read is it not as if the fountains were flung 
open and the great river came pouring down over the 
arid desert? The local standard, the mere arbitrary 
fashion of the moment, disappears in the great rich- 
ness of human life ; the part bathes itself in the 



BIOGRAPHY. 207 

whole; the morbid becomes healthy; the peculiar is 
freed from any haunting affectation, and becomes sim- 
ply that individual expression of the universal which 
every true man must be. 

Do we say that all this may come through large as- 
sociation with our living fellow-men without reading 
about the dead ? Much of it may, no doubt, come so. 
But in some respects the great dead, whose faces look 
out on us through their biographies, have always the 
advantage ; they are the best of their kind, the most 
picturesque illustrations of the characters they bear ; 
their lives upon the earth are finished and complete. 
They will not change some day and throw into con- 
fusion the lessons which we have learned from them ; 
and since they belong to many lands and many times 
they bring us a sense of universal human life which 
cannot come to us from the most active contact with 
living men, who, after all, must represent very much 
the same conditions to which we ourselves belong. 

Therefore, while it is good to walk among the living, 
it is good also to live with the wise, great, good dead. 
It keeps out of life the dreadful feeling of extempo- 
raneousness with its conceit and its despair. It makes 
us alway know that God made other men before He 
made us. It furnishes a constant background for our 
living. It provides us with perpetual humility and 
inspiration. 

There are some of the great old paintings in which 
some common work of common men is going on, some 
serious but most familiar action, — the meeting of two 
friends, the fighting of a battle, a marriage or a 
funeral, and all the background of the picture is a 
mass of living faces, dim, misty, evidently with a vail 



208 BIOGRAPHY. 

between them and the life we live, yet evidently there, 
evidently watching the sad or happy scene, and evi- 
dently creating an atmosphere within which the action 
of the picture goes its way. Like such a picture is 
the life of one who lives in a library of biographies, 
and feels the lives which have been, always pouring in 
their spirit and example on the lives which have suc- 
ceeded them upon the earth. 

I thank you for your kind and patient attention, 
and if anything which I have said has been of interest 
or value to you, I am very glad. 



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William F. Warren, LL. D. Paradise Found, cr. 8vo, $2.00. 

William A. Wheeler, Dictionary of Noted Names of Fic- 
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Edwin P. Whipple. Essays, 6 vols. cr. 8vo, each $1.50. 

Richard Grant White. Every-Day English, 121110, $2.00; 
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Woodrow Wilson. Congressional Government, i6mo, $1.25. 

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W. B. Wright. Ancient Cities from the Dawn to the Day- 
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